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The Senseless I Will

“Wives, submit yourself unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife—”

I didn’t authorise this. But I’d given the vicar free rein. Now he’s spooling Ephesians over my head. Submit. Obey.

I stand at the altar of St. Peter’s Church in Rodmell. The saint of my brother’s name. No doubt he’s with me, though at this point, I have no faith of any kind. I think of him only as lost. But I am the one who is lost.

The church wedding was Walter’s request.* More than request, in truth. “Registry Office weddings aren’t valid,” he said. He calls himself Christian, though he never attends. The boarding school he attended from five: a cathedral school, which put him in the choir, and beat him for writing letters to his Mum that said, “I hate it here.” Masters beat him repeatedly until he learned to sing hymns and write letters of soothing lies. That was enough to make the church feel like family. His sister calls herself Christian, too. Unlike him, she attends her local church every Sunday and arranges the flowers on the aisles. But unlike Christ, she judges me constantly. Spikes me with words that Walter insists I ignore. “It’s just who she is,” he says.

His parents, who stand now at my back, call themselves Christians too. His father, Jerry, recently retired from the Diplomatic Service, his belly pregnant with fine dining and after-dinner brandies, adjusts the old school tie. His mother, June, white curls around a Southern Irish voice and smoker’s mouth, has a musical laugh and a cardinal two branches back on the family tree. With their stories of dining with Indira Gandhi, Imran Khan, and Prince Philip — who, seated next to June, let out a fart, then famously said “Don’t worry, I’ll say it was me” — they’ve retired to South Wales.

If it had to be a church, I figured, let’s make it a meaningful one. Virginia Woolf is my touchstone. We share a birthday. I’ve read her diaries, and I nurture a sense of companionship with Virginia, soul sister in despair. Because I still nurse a private darkness. Wounds I’ve no idea how to heal. Walter and I got a dog, as part of the process that tangled me into commitment. A regular weekend walk is to the river at Rodmell. A mud-clod pilgrimage from Virginia’s cottage to the river where she drowned herself, loading her pockets with stones, in the middle of the war. I’ve often stood at the raised banks of this river: the Ouse. Which, like its name, is muddy and uninviting. Fast-flowing when the fields have emptied themselves of rain. Water would never be my exit. I can’t imagine doing what she did. But I can imagine life in her cottage. Its garden backing onto the churchyard. This pretty church.

If I had to get married in church, shouldn’t it be this one, connecting me, through its literary bloodline, to a writer I love and admire? But how to get married there, out of my parish? Oh, the lengths I had to go to. Attending every Sunday for six full months before the banns were read. I couldn’t fake believing in God. But I could say honestly, yes, I was seeking. Because, on some level, I was.

I was raised a good atheist. My parents were scientists. Though my mum had been a Christian Scientist once. But on a Sunday walk by an English canal when my brothers were two, she watched a toddler drown in a weir. Lost her faith in a handful of minutes, as the parents and other adults dove in and searched the tumbling waters to rescue the child so similar in age to her own. But he wasn’t saved. His body was quietly drawn by the current along the canal bed and swept away while the frantic adults continued to search the spot where he’d fallen in. The mother screaming, then sobbing, on the tow path, my mother’s arm around her, useless, useless. She told me that was the day she gave up God. Because how could there be a God if that could happen? And if there was a God, then he wasn’t very nice to be killing toddlers for no reason she could fathom. So she was Godless before I was born.

For a short while, she sent me and my siblings to Sunday School. Mr Wiffen and his one built-up shoe, the short leg due to polio. Colouring in a picture of the Good Samaritan putting the injured traveller on his donkey. Making dried palm leaves into crosses. I was only sent there so my parents could argue in peace. And when they split, it stopped.

Until they lined us up on the sofa and broke the news, I had no idea my parents were even unhappy. Though my Mum did slap me more than I deserved. Red palm prints stinging the back of my thighs for hours. When I said, “It’s not fair,” she told me, “Life’s not fair.” And there was that time I was picked up from school by the neighbour, Jean. Mum wasn’t home for days, and no one said why. And many years later, I found out she’d taken an overdose that day. Was in Severalls, the mental hospital, a scare-place bandied about at school. It was all hushed up. They never rowed, that I knew of. My mum was just silently sinking into despair.

My own despair began once hers abated. As though it was handed on, mother to daughter. She abandoned the good ship motherhood for the shore of another relationship and left me alone in a sea of feelings, mostly buoyed by anger, but sometimes drowning. And no question, as I weighed my life, the value of it, in the following years — mostly in notebooks, sometimes on a footbridge over a four-lane road — I wandered sometimes into churches. Asked the crisp curves of the rafters, Is anyone there? Stood in the aisle waiting for something to happen. For light to stream through the window and gift me peace.

So it’s not a lie, this statement “I’m a seeker”. The lay preacher invites me for faith-exploring evenings with others like me. But they’re not like me. They don’t ask difficult questions. Or get pat answers that don’t seem like answers at all. When he starts to suggest I head towards confirmation, I give it up. Nothing’s confirmed, besides the banns. It’s all up in the air.

Except this one thing now: the wedding date (lucky twelfth). And around it, other things get confirmed: the design and colour of the bridesmaid’s dresses, the number of bridesmaids (lucky six). The reception venue (grand, with gardens). The design of the dress that my mother will make in silk, which I order from a flagship store, rushing there on the tube in my lunch hour from my work in Moorgate. And the meal is fixed (roast beef, he insists), and the seating plan, and the flowers, and the gift list, and the vintage Bentley in cream and black with its long ribboned bonnet.

And the church. The perfect marriage venue for a Woolf lover.

Wolf lover. I used to joke with a writer friend about the wolves in Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber. Men who were “hairy on the inside”. I think this man I’m marrying isn’t a wolf. Nothing predatory about him, surely. Isn’t he more like a father figure? Protective? Yet. There have been moments. Snags in the fabric of my comfortable story.

A double date with our work friends Mike and Marjory. Walter is driving the four of us somewhere. Men in the front, women in the back. Mike floats a hypothetical question.

“What would you do if you found out she cheated on you?”

Walter drags on the Rothmans. Taps the sparks through the open top inch of the window.

“I’d kill her,” he says, matter-of-factly.

I catch his eyes in the rear-view mirror. They are cold as a marble slab. This isn’t a joke.

Did I say anything? I don’t remember saying anything. What could I say that wouldn’t make his next words more frightening? His diamond was glinting on my finger. I’m engaged to this man. What he said: it’s a blip. Out of character. He’s I’ll get the round in, hearty laughs, bonhomie. I turn my face to the glittering dark. Ride through the moment. Seconds pass. Then minutes, then months.

Not long before my wedding, I sit with him in front of the evening news. It’s three weeks since the riot at Strangeways Prison that led to prisoners taking control of the building. Three weeks of ongoing protest. They’ve unfurled banners over the roof and out of windows: “Inhumane conditions”, “Innocent until proven guilty”. Most of the prisoners there are on remand. They’re protesting at 23-hour-a-day lock-ins, physical assault, the use of the chemical cosh to control them. “We want to speak to MPs”, the banners say. “Media contact now.”

“They should just go in and shoot them,” Walter says.

Incredibly calm. Matter of fact. I can hardly believe it’s come out of his mouth.

“But a lot of them aren’t even proven guilty of a crime!” I say. “There are teenagers in there. And nothing in this country is a capital offence.”

“Shoot them, get it over with,” he says. “It’s costing taxpayers money.”

I’m enraged. And soon, I’m standing up, shouting at him, and he’s laughing at me. He drives me so crazy that I snatch the wine bottle that both of us emptied and throw it at his feet.

It bounces, and he laughs even more.

“You’re pathetic,” he says. “Go on! Have another go!”

I can’t bear it. This man. Who the hell am I marrying? I can’t bear to be with him another second. In tears, I grab my keys and purse, walk blindly out of the house, no idea where I’m going. I must get as far away from him as I can. I walk to the station, catch a train to London, calling my friend on the way. I reach her flat in Streatham at 11 pm. She’s ironing a pile of knickers. I don’t understand why anyone would do that. Ironing’s hateful, and knickers don’t even need ironing. She says she enjoys it. Finds it soothing. And what’s all this about then?

I tell her about the argument. The things he said. His callous disregard for life. The way he mocked me for having compassion for them.

She sits me down.

“Has he ever said anything like this before?”

“No.”

“Maybe it’s pressure,” she says. “Maybe it’s nerves. Imminent weddings do funny things to people. I remember when Ian and I were about to get married—”

Her story doesn’t involve Ian saying people should be executed without trial.

“He was so heartless.”

“Maybe it was a joke to wind you up.”

“So infuriating though.”

“Men are infuriating,” she laughs.

“I don’t think I want to marry him. How can I marry a man like that?”

I talk it through. The wedding is huge, expensive, paid for — and three weeks away. I decide it was just a stupid argument. Stress about the big day. Pre-wedding jitters manifesting as a political disagreement. So the next morning, I go home to him and carry on as if nothing happened. I don’t call it off.

The cruelty I saw that night, the casual disregard for human life, the mockery and amusement at my distress, was a trailer for the feature film I was about to live through. But the seating arrangements were confirmed, the guests had bought presents, my mother had hand-made a dress in real silk with pearl-beaded lace, to my size and specifications. I was twenty-six, and thought calling off a wedding three weeks out would be more catastrophic than marrying someone who thought shooting prisoners was a reasonable policy.

And didn’t I already have cold feet? That dog I’d bought with him, when I walked him alone, I’d find myself talking out loud, arguing myself again and again into going ahead. Cold feet, it’s just cold feet, I told myself. And everyone gets cold feet. I talked it through with my mother, and she agreed. Cold feet, cold feet. And now my feet are so frozen I barely feel them. Which is just as well, pinched into those bridal shoes.

If I was going to call it off, those were the times. Before I was here, at the altar.

“Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband?”

“I will.”

With the words escaped from my lips, my hearing muffles. I’m underwater. A high-pitched note rings through my head, as though angels sing warning at the top of my audible range. The service continues. I have to pretend. When prompted, I repeat the words the vicar is mouthing. But I cannot hear them.

It’s as though my ears can’t believe what they heard, and popped. Gave up, shut down, we’re done. You agreed to this? say my ears. We don’t want to hear another word.

The deafness continues while I sign the registry book. While I walk back up the aisle and emerge into sunshine, applause, and confetti. While photos are snapped. While I run to the beribboned Bentley. While I take my seat beside Walter, who, full of his happiness, pours us both champagne in the back of the car. While the car makes its way to the grand country house my dad has hired for the reception, where the first piece of business is The Receiving Line.

I stand and wait beside Walter, a newly-filled flute in my hand. The guests arrive, queuing up one by one and two by two to say the same thing. I am guessing and nodding, smiling and secretly deaf.

Congratulations! they mouth at me. Congratulations! Congratulations!

I cannot hear a bloody thing.

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent (me) from potential lawsuits.

How about you? Did you walk into a marriage trap? Did you blame yourself? If the answer to these questions is yes, I want you to ask yourself these questions aloud.

• Have I forgiven myself fully?

• Do I trust my instincts now?

Feel the answer to these. A ‘no’ is a contraction, a tightness, a zing of negative emotion… and maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll hear an inner NO.

If you get a ‘no’ to either question, scroll down to the bottom of this post for the reframes you can use to completely release yourself from self-blame.

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Why I Stole Your Life — join the serialised read

“The curse of Eve, as I have understood it on my short time on this earth, is a great nuisance to all women, but especially so to those women who choose to live outside their sex, as I do. Nevertheless I will not have the course of my life undone by some ancient minikin’s urge to eat fruit.”

Catch up on the story with these chapters:

Okay, here we are. The fabled ‘bottom of the post’. You made it!

Right — back to that ‘no’ you felt, assuming you felt one.

I’m slipping this section behind a paywall, because this kind of work deserves people who’ve chosen to be here, not passers-by. You can grab a 7-day free trial as your ticket through, and you’ll get a bunch of goodies alongside (everything paid subscribers get) and some time to work with the reframes that demolish self-blame.

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You Need Not Be a Child to the Parent

‘A mouse!’ says Jim, holding his side from a laughing stitch. ‘A bloody mouse!’

‘In truth,’ I say, ‘it wasn’t a mouse that startled me. I startled myself. I didn’t intend to set alight to anything. I was the most shocked of them all.’

‘Then you are the mouse,’ he says, triumphant. ‘Startling yourself. Come, Mouse! Buy me an ale.’

Night is falling and his oranges have been locked away. I have a gentleman’s message in my pocket that I will say I was made to wait for. I am gladder to see Jim Coker than ever. He has a split lip from what he calls ‘a gentleman’s disagreement’ which I gather once we are sat in the tap room with our ales was just a regular beating from his Uncle that he dressed up in words in order to feel more courageous about it.

‘Better to say I was defending my honour with some stranger,’ he says, ‘than that I was smashed up by my only family. When your own blood think you a sorry wretch worth smacking why should anyone else think otherwise?’

I think of how my mother’s palm used to sting: not only the roughness of it but the fact she would hit me at all.

‘Why do you not stand up to him?’ I ask. ‘You are almost his size now.’

‘It’s his roof,’ says Jim. ‘I figure I can take lumps under his roof or take worse in the street. The street is no place to sleep, aside from the cold. There’s people will rob your eyeballs from under your eyelids, I heard.’

‘That’s not true!’ I say, though his words force me to see such a robbing as vividly as though I had witnessed it.

‘It’s only an expression,’ he laughs. ‘Soon, I will have enough money to rent my own rooms. I have some things of value in my possession, and I am collecting more of them, and so long as my Uncle doesn’t find them they will buy me my escape before too long.’

‘Where do you collect them from?’ I ask.

‘Places,’ he says, looking down at his ale. And then brightly, ‘Not places you should go, Mouse.’

‘I’m no Mouse!’ I say. ‘I’m taller than you are.’

‘That’s why it’s funnier,’ he says. ‘I can’t very well call you Burnt Bed, can I? If I call you Mouse we shall always remember your secret. Which makes us firmer friends. You don’t object to that, do you?’

‘No,’ I say, and use that pledge of friendship to proceed to my business, saying that as we are firm friends, there is something I must ask of him. I unfold to him my plan that he might look out for my mother and, if he sees her, ask Gordon or George to watch his oranges and follow her so as to find out where she is living. The complication is that he saw her only briefly, and though he noted her gaudy dress, that is something that might be changed. He says he isn’t confident he would recognise her again, and I am at a loss to describe her apart from her being slender boned and pale skinned with brown hair.

‘No identifying marks?’ he asks, doing an impression of Mister Rathbone, the market’s infamous beadle.

I can think of none. The problem being that she is pretty enough to ply her trade in private rooms, which kind of prettiness is all about the absence of difference, perfectly even eyes and lips and skin tones, and just the right measure of prettiness not to stand out at all. Not a mole nor a scar to define her, nor in the other direction, exceptional eyes or other body parts. When I have failed to describe her in any manner that might allow Jim to identify her by sight, he has another idea. A lady-friend of his Uncle’s works in the same trade, in the part of town they call the Birdcage, and he thinks she might be able to locate my mother if furnished with a name.

‘They all have made-up names,’ he says. ‘Buttercup and Kitten and the like. But they use real names with each other. She might know your Ma.’

So I tell him our mother’s name, and he tells me I must get something for his Uncle’s lady-friend in return.

‘What would she like?’ I ask, hoping he won’t say anything that will force me to dig too deeply into my secreted crowns. They are my first line of defence should I find myself cast out.

‘Mathematics,’ he says, and for a moment I think I have tuned out for more than a few seconds, perhaps several minutes, and missed a whole by-water of the conversation that has led to this unlikely word.

‘I should give her Mathematics?’ I ask, fully expecting to be corrected and clipped round the ear for falling asleep.

‘Some Mathematical puzzles,’ he says. ‘It is her great peculiarity. She can calculate in her head with extreme rapidity and likes nothing better than to show off this skill to men who have come to her for her other talents. My Uncle has not yet given her a sum she could not do, but that is unsurprising since he stayed at petty school only three years and knows only enough mathematics to be sure when an orange is priced to make a profit.’

‘Where will I get Mathematical puzzles?’ I ask.

‘Why from your former tutor, that bespectacled beanpole who licks Latin out of the air. He gave you mathematics as well, did he not?’

‘He tried,’ I say, ‘but I am not very accomplished.’

‘Ask him for equations,’ Jim says. ‘I hear equations are delightful to her.’

‘You mean sums,’ I say?

‘Oh no, bigger than sums. Something equations. Quadrangle equations. Or was it Adriatic equations. From Greece, I think.’

I have no idea what equations he means, but imagine something to savour, like a ripe fig.

‘I will ask Mister Rotard,’ I say, and I do, the next morning, through the kindness of Mrs Fredericks, who knows where he lodges. The equations cost me one of my precious crowns because, as he put it when I surprised him in his pyjamas, his knowledge cost him dear and he should not be expected to part with it for nothing. In the afternoon I deliver into Jim’s hand a piece of paper covered with letters and numbers that make no sense to either of us. It is a peculiar thing to be swapping for my mother’s address. After that, I have nothing to do but wait. And in all the in between time, I must manage not to bleed on my new mattress (about which Demoiselle de Vaucresson was very cross in the Frenchest way you can imagine) or my clothes or indeed the floor, chairs, or any other place.

Since I do not feel I can take more of Kate’s clouts and dispose of them, for two days I am reduced to stealing rags from washing lines. There is often a message to be delivered at the end of the day, whether to someone that was seen earlier, to thank them, or someone who will be seen tomorrow, to confirm arrangements, and I make short diversions to neighbourhoods where I will not be recognised, in the part of my errand where it is just getting dark, so that I might be more hidden in the half-light, and only steal from women careless enough not to notice that night has fallen. The act of stealing makes my heart thud, but that sensation is not unpleasant.

By the end of the week, as I am running through the market with a message in my pocket, Jim whistles me over, and when he has finished serving he says his Uncle Ted’s lady friend has given him an address, and folds it into my hand. We arrange to go there together during my evening message run. In the thin hour between the end of the market and the start of supper, we lock up his barrow of oranges before leaving. The cold sky is already darkening, and stars are winking at us like sprites come to see us make mischief. Jim is excited about visiting a house of ill repute, but I am wary.

The house whose address is on the piece of paper is as shabby as the handwriting that spells it, and I am surprised at the outer state of it, which seems far worse than our old cottage in Broxholme. But when we are let in by an older, bent-nosed woman who assumes us customers, it is transformed. The walls are draped with coloured cloth, even in the hallway, perhaps to cover the mould and damp that I can smell despite the heavy scent of incense. The incense is especially strange to me because the only place I have smelt incense is in church. This is a strange kind of church, I suppose, where some men come to worship or be worshipped.

I am so bemused by the colourful walls, the churchy smell, and the very obvious wig of the woman I am following, that I am taken aback when a man and woman lurch out of a side-room like a pillar collapsing, he half-undressed, she giggling, smacking against the wall just in front of my nose. They would have pancaked me had I been an inch or two further along. The woman (a bright and broad smile on her like the kind of apples grocers put in their windows, all polished up, and nothing like the wormy things they try to sell you) untangles herself from him, and leads him like a puppy into another room further along.

‘Pay no heed,’ says the bent-nosed woman, turning only briefly over her shoulder, ‘come this way,’ and we go deeper into the house, which goes back much further than I thought.

‘We’re not customers,’ I say, running it quickly out of me like water from a pricked bladder, ‘I’m here to talk to my mother.’ The woman stops sharply, turns round like I’ve prodded her behind.

‘Who’s your mother?’ she asks.

‘Margret Read,’ says I.

And she sighs and starts shoofing me out with her hands, shoofing like we might the dim sort of animals that go where you herd them, sheep or milk cows. Yet her flapping hands command, shoof, shoof, shoof, and I find myself walking backwards, and since I don’t bump into him, Jim too.

‘I must speak to her!’ I protest, walking backwards all the time, and she carries on flapping her hands.

When finally she has backed us both onto the step she says,

‘There is no talk of mothers in this house. We are not mothers and we don’t have children here. And Margret is busy at this present time.’

I note her words have become very stiff and precise, as though accidentally over-starched.

‘However,’ she continues, ‘should you choose to wait round the back, near the two privies there, I will send her out to speak to you when she is done.’

I look to Jim, who is beaming with curiosity.

‘Round the back,’ she says, closing the door.

‘Come on then,’ says Jim, taking my arm, ‘let’s go round the back,’ but I halt like a horse that’s spooked.

‘Not you,’ I say. ‘There’ll be no privacy there. I don’t want you hearing —’

‘No privacy at the privies?’ he smiles, but he drops my arm and says, ‘Of course, you must go alone. I’ll wait here, shall I? You haven’t got a few shillings on you, have you?’

‘No,’ I say, though I do. I don’t want him spending them there. So I leave him on the step, and there he is some time later when I return to him, chewing on a piece of liquorice that came from goodness knows where.

In the between time, waiting by a necessary house for my mother seems more fitting the longer I do it, and by the time I hear footsteps I am considering it the very best place for meeting a parent who has so often caused me discomfort, thoughts of whom I have so often wished to bury. Yet when I see her I have an immediate hope that she will be glad of it That her face will light differently on mine than the last time we spoke. That she will have come belatedly to those feelings for their children that mothers are traditionally believed to feel.

‘Oh,’ she says, as she comes around the back of the privy and finds me there, ‘it’s you.’

There is enough light from the newly risen moon to bathe both our faces in their disappointment.

‘Do you have another grown child that would call you mother?’ I ask.

And I see then she held out some strange hope of it being you.

‘I did not expect you,’ she says. ‘That you would’ — she hesitates and turns her face away and back again — ‘that you would call.’

‘You thought it more likely that my missing brother would find you than that I would travel a mile across London to do so?’

She looks shamefaced.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘it is not the past that I am here to dredge. It is the present that needs dealing with. If you do not wish me to be thrown out of my position, you will need to advise me.’

I surprise myself with the tone of my voice: the grown up and business-like manner of speaking I suddenly have with her, as though I am the mother and she the child. I do not know whether it is my being treated for two years as a gentleman, and the schooling of Mister Rotard, or whether it is due to my being a liveried Footboy and she being a whore. Perhaps it is simply my contempt for her, which has grown as my body has grown. Imagining this meeting I had thought I would shrink in her presence and become the child she so easily beat and cowed. But now I find I have better words than she does, and great strength in the wrongs she has done me, that hold me calm and metalled in front of her, my whole face a kind of armour, as I explain what I need to know: how to manage my monthly bleeding without discovery.

She is the right person to ask, not only because she is invested in being rid of me, but because women of her profession have developed many useful deceits, especially when it comes to womanly bleeding, which is deemed so poisonous to male flesh that men would not be customers for one week a month if they knew of it. She is clearly grateful that it is this rather than any other thing that I am asking her. Perhaps she dreaded I would ask her to be my mother again, give me shelter, provide for me in some way. Her gratitude spills out in several bundles of practically delivered information. Clouts, she says, being bulky and troublesome, are sometimes discarded for another arrangement: sponges, which can be cut into the sizes of small fists and stuffed where necessary.

I do not immediately understand what is to be done with these pieces of sponge until she mimes what she means in so unfortunate a movement that I hope no grown child ever has to see their mother do such a thing in the rest of history. She has, in her new profession, forgotten any degree of decorum she once pretended to adopt, and she does not even register the horror on my face as she continues, telling me that it is easy enough to rinse them out, and dry them, and far less conspicuous than a line of clouts.

All the time she is not quite looking me in the eye, and is from time to time tugging down the ends of her sleeves to cover wrists that look discoloured, blotchy and dark.

When I have asked all I know how to ask and our conversation is concluded, she requests that I do not seek her out again. And though I hardly needed her reason, she feels compelled to supply one.

‘It is painful to me,’ she says.

‘On what basis?’

‘To be so estranged from you. To not know you.’

‘If that were true,’ I say, ‘then you would surely wish to see more of me, so that you might come to know me.’

She looks to the end of the alley, and back again, and then up to the sky and down to the ground, so that it’s clear she’s doing anything other than put her eyes on me.

‘You look like him,’ she says. ‘Your brother.’

For a moment, she stares into me as though I were a hole in the ground. As she turns to go I catch sight of her cheek: a pale bruise under the eye. I stand in the alleyway until her steps have reached the back door and bolted it shut.

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We’re rolling in bullshit. Have you ever owned a dog who loved to roll in the stinkiest thing they could find? Fox poo, rotten fish, a cow pat? They do it to mask their own smell.

Online, the smell of reality’s growing fainter. We’ve been rolling in bullshit for quite a few years: bullshit of all kinds. ‘Fake news!’ said the biggest pathological liar to ever hold office in the Western World, as the Information Age slid into the prefix ‘Mis-’. Then a couple of years ago, AI stepped into the ring.

Now we’re so thoroughly caked in bullshit that most of us can’t smell reality. What to believe? Should we just believe nothing? We cry ‘AI!’ at things that are true. Would the US bomb a schoolhouse of girls? The world’s leading deepfake expert, defeated by the slew of ever-more-believable lies and unbelievable truths, has thrown in the towel.

Videos, photos, text. AI writing is slick and flawless. AI-generated posts get thousands of likes; most people can’t tell, or don’t care. I see ‘beautifully written! You should be a writer!’ under AI-generated comments on Facebook. I start watching a viral Instagram reel whose message (women are the stronger sex) is tailored to cater to my tastes… and recognise a few seconds in, it’s an AI script. Does that make it bad, when the mission is positive? When a standard flawed human could never come up with something so tightly argued and rhetorically persuasive?

Still, I can’t bring myself to light the ‘like’. Because I know something real, from a human desperate to feel heard and seen, got squashed by the algorithm to make way for this attention-friendly script. Because I fear I am quickly becoming one of those humans.

The CEO of Barnes & Noble, James Daunt, says he’s happy to stock AI-generated books. Take a Break magazine has stopped paying writers for short fiction; all its future stories will be generated in-house by AI. As the landscape for writers who actually write becomes tougher and thinner, I chose to believe one thing might remain fully human. Literary fiction. The glittery land with the prizes where my feet have touched down once or twice.

But it seems I was wrong.

As soon as Jamir Nazir’s story ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ won the Caribbean category of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was published in Granta, the rumbling began. The story was peppered with well-known AI constructions and phrases. Was that the sound of half a ton of literary bullshit being tipped out of an AI tipper truck? Could ChatGPT have written those deep-sounding-yet-puddle-shallow similes? Was it an LLM, primed to write in high literary style, which declared “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men”?

Nobody knew. It’s easy to accuse, hard to prove. The AI-detection software, Pangram, said it was 100% AI. They ran all the winners since 2012 through the software. AI was detected in zero winning stories until 2025, when one regional winner was flagged. This year, three of the five regional winners were flagged as AI.

This was not enough to strip Nazir of the prize. Pangram does throw up false positives. There were other grounds for suspicion. Nazir, 62, was unknown in local writing circles, which is unusual. You rarely get good enough to win a prize like this in isolation. As an aspiring writer, undertaking such a solitary craft, you tend to crave community: feedback, validation, opportunities to read, shared workshops. Usually, one or two other writers close by will know you as a writer. But okay, let’s say you’re Emily Dickinson (and boy would her m-dash use get her flagged!). You have a health condition (he has at least two), and you barely leave your house. He could be that absolute outlier, the unknown, solitary genius writer catapulted from nowhere into the limelight.

Granta was unnerved enough by the accusations to withdraw, permanently, from its relationship with the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and its commitment to publish the regional winners. Writers everywhere lose.

Nazir went on to win the overall prize, netting himself £7,500. You can see why you might — why anyone might — want to cheat. But of course we can’t prove that Nazir used AI. The Commonwealth Foundation held ‘detailed discussions’ with the regional winners and declared itself satisfied.

But in my honest opinion, there is definitely something fishy. And that beached corpse of conger eel stinking up the scene (looking so much like a serpent) can be detected by any good bullshit detector in the words of Nazir himself. (Apologies for the mixed olfactory metaphor). The genius here is Will Oremus, who interviewed Nazir for The Atlantic.

Let’s just say this. If bullshitting were an Olympic sport, ChatGPT would win silver, and Claude would win gold. But Jamir Nazir? I doubt he’d even get through to the regionals. Because the point of bullshit is to be convincing. To mask your own stink. To come up, if you can, smelling like roses. Will Oremus sows the first seeds of doubt in his preface:

On several occasions, he seemed to avoid answering my questions directly; when he did, some of the answers were circuitous. I was surprised to hear him opine that AI-generated writing will soon be widely accepted in literature, even as he maintained that he didn’t use AI tools in creating his story. He seemed bullish on AI overall, viewing it as a revolutionary technology, though he worried about the repercussions of saying so.

Bullish, or bullshittish. You decide. I’ve spoken to thousands of writers, read hundreds of interviews, and one thing I know. When you ask a writer about their favourite writers, they usually have quite a lot to say. And they won’t necessarily name the most obvious names.

Oremus: You’ve talked about how the unusual writing style in “The Serpent in the Grove” stemmed from your love of poetry. Who are a couple of your favorite poets who have inspired you?

Nazir: The first one whose poetry I fell in love with was a guy known as Pablo Neruda from Chile. And his teacher or mentor was a lady known as Gabriela Mistral. Both of them had a profound impact on me. Then there is Derek Walcott, a Caribbean poet who, like Pablo Neruda, is a Nobel Prize winner.

I like the way he named Pablo Neruda, an exceptionally famous poet, as though the Atlantic guy wouldn’t have heard of him. I’ll give him points for Gabriela Mistral, but what he says about them both having a ‘profound impact’ is awfully bland. Derek Walcott also gives us very little, being the most obvious poet for a Caribbean writer to name. Which leads us on to my favourite part of the interview:

Oremus: You had mentioned some of your inspirations earlier, including Walcott and Neruda. What’s your favorite Walcott work?

Nazir: Walcott has a lot of Caribbean poems, right? And I cannot—there are several, and they talk about the destruction of a village because of the sea. And I wrote something like that. It’s quite a change. And I am advertising a little bit, but I have a collection that I have written, my Caribbean collection, sort of Walcott-style. I tried to edit it as much myself as I could, and it’s ready for publication. So hopefully this award will give me the platform to publish this.

Oremus: But do you have a favorite of Walcott’s poems?

Nazir: A story of Walcott’s?

Oremus: Yeah.

Nazir: To be honest with you, I can’t think of a specific favorite right now. I am getting a little bit of brain fog in recall. I had an excellent memory, and now it haunts me because at times I can’t remember even basic stuff. I think it’s a part of the condition, the illness. And I’m on chemotherapy as well. So that is a hard thing.

The poor man! It’s really shitty having two serious illnesses. Especially when one of them makes you think that Derek Walcott wrote stories. I mean, given how useful Nazir says he finds AI for research, you’d think he could have done some.

AI, did Derek Walcott write stories?

I mean, that brain fog must be really, REALLY bad.

I don’t want to get dragged into a defamation suit again, so let’s just say that “alleged” AI author Jamir Nazir’s interview is not a masterclass in lying.

It remains to be seen whether someone can lie and cheat their way into literary splendour rather than literary infamy. I’m guessing a sociopath could manage it, but Jamir Nazir is not a sociopath. He’s an ordinary fallible human being.

or if you prefer, you can

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Writing a book is a long game. Most writers don’t need cheerleading — they need someone who will read carefully, understand what they are aiming to achieve, and tell them the truth. That’s what I offer.

I work with writers on novels and narrative non-fiction, reading your manuscript in 10,000-word chunks and meeting with you to discuss what’s working, what isn’t, and how to move forward. I’ve been teaching creative writing for close to thirty years — at Goldsmiths, University of London for ten of those, at Sussex University for another twelve, at Arvon, at the Poetry School — and I bring the same rigour to private mentoring. I have assisted in the birth of novels that have changed their authors’ lives.

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Hungry for historical fiction with a strong female lead?

I took eight years to research and write the fictional autobiography of the real-life soldier and pirate Mary Read, and was weeks from finishing when another author got a 6-figure deal for hers, killing mine. Now I’m serialising mine weekly. Read Why I Stole Your Life and fall in love.

“The more I see of the relative freedoms of girls and boys, of women and men, the more I knew I must turn from boy to man, and be a man all of my days.

For example. Only girls and women have babies, and by all accounts that is a fearsome thing, worse than getting a lead bullet shot into your belly by a musket, worse than being entirely run over by a dray cart, and in the same manner, as often as not, fatal. But all women must bear it, because thousands of years ago a woman bit into an apple.”

Join the story (or catch up) here:

Then meet one of my favourite characters, Jim Coker:

Love books? Writing is my passion and calling, and readers are my joy. Read triple-award-winning novel The Marlowe Papers, Encore Award shortlistee Devotion, or the poetry collections How Things Are on Thursday and Material.

Over to you

If you’ve scrolled down this far, I’d love to hear what you think about the Atlantic interview with Jamir Nazir.

• Is it a damning detail that your ‘favourite writer’ didn’t write stories, or do you give the guy a pass because he (allegedly) has brain fog?

• Do you care whether a story is written by a human or not, if you enjoy the story?

• Should all literary prize entries be passed through Pangram before being considered by judges?

• Must we all now keep timestamped documents so as not to be accused of AI writing?

• Or could timestamped documents also be faked? (I’m thinking by someone techie, why not? Just ask Claude how to do it, surely.)

• Do we stand any chance against this onslaught once the sociopaths get wind of easy money for a few apt prompts?

• Boy, I have way too many questions. What about you?

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The Secret of Bleeding is to Bleed in Secret

Wrongness wakes me. Wetness. Sleepily, I send a hand down to touch it, bring it out, like catching a fish. Black in the dawn light, but I already sense what colour it means to be. Wide awake now, I keep my bloodied hand held high, struggle out of the blanket onto my feet and pull bedclothes away to reveal a wide map of red.

Am I murdered? Stabbed by some assassin and not yet sensible to the pain? Has Cook, finally, lost all reason and patience with me? Moved from spoon to knife? She has two good knives would do this, fillet me out of my skin.

On the sheet is written the whole country of me. How I began and how I end. Mercy yes, so much blood in my bed I must surely be on my way out of this world. With my unbloodied hand, I feel my belly for an injury. No break in the skin. Did the bucket hit me so hard that something inside has been severed? That would count as foolish as the King of England dying from a molehill. Must I die of a bad catch?

But you’re already wise, are you not? You know how common it is for a person to bleed who has been cursed with a certain kind of innards. Cursed is the word that now comes to calm me: cursed I am, indeed, for this mess is the curse of Eve. Which thought sits me down, less horrified, on the edge of that ruined mattress, to contemplate what to do.

The curse of Eve, as I have understood it on my short time on this earth, is a great nuisance to all women, but especially so to those women who choose to live outside their sex, as I do. Nevertheless I will not have the course of my life undone by some ancient minikin’s urge to eat fruit. The problem of the bloodied bed must be solved, and I must solve it with nothing but my own ingenuity. A mole may end the life of a king, but I shan’t have mine overturned by a bloody sheet. I strip it off and see the problem goes deeper: blood has soaked into the mattress, staining the ticking and soaking inside to the straw, which will go mouldy and rancid if washed or mopped, unless I can find some manner of drying it. Those parts that would betray the secret of my sex are as much on the inside as the outside. I will not be saved by cold water and salt. I put the sheet back as it was, peel off my stained nightshirt, mop the floor with it (for I have dripped there too), and place it over the red map on the sheet, with all the bloodied part of it hidden beneath. Then I fold the unbloodied blanket over sheet and shirt, and say a small prayer that it is not laundry day and Kate will not be up to strip my bedclothes in an hour.

I sponge off my body, pinking the water in the washbowl. Pour the contents very carefully out of the window onto the sloping shingles of the roof, already slick with drizzle. Then dress and go downstairs. My first task is to liberate some clouts from the linen cupboard without being seen. Back in my room, I tuck one into my breeches which are tight enough, I think, to hold it in place. I am asked to run a message to Picadilly, and though it is out of my way, I beat a path to Jim Coker, who knows far more about the world than I do.

Am I undone? Will I be cast out on the streets? It is like opening a box of snakes to let myself think such things. I am half down the street before I must stop because I cannot breathe for sobbing. Worse, the running has shifted the clout I stuffed between my legs and I will have blood down my breeches if I cannot adjust it. I take myself off down an alley and walk until I can breathe and at least half think. When there is no-one one about, I put my hands into my breeches enough to position the clout where it needs to be. I will bandage it to me in the future, but for now I must walk with my thighs somewhat pressed together.

I know this bleeding has something to do with having babies. I dread swelling up like my mother, because there would be no hope of staying a boy then. But then I recall how I was got upon my mother with a clonk to the head in the stairwell, and that it always takes a man to put a baby in a woman, and I have never been close enough to a man to be clonked (excepting the sort who wouldn’t clonk me: you, Mister Lampard, Mister Rotard, Adisa, and Mister Thomas). Nor have I done the twining thing that prostitutes do around men in doorways, which I sometimes walk past at a pace, which must be the start of it or a part of it. Since I have known neither clonking nor twining I must be safe from growing a baby in my belly, at least for now. But I am not safe from being found out. I breathe quieter and quieter, and shut all feeling away again, until I have a notion what I might say to Jim.

Jim is learning a new trick to do with dislocating his shoulders. Or looking that way, anyway, so he can slide himself through small spaces, he says, and when I ask him what small spaces he laughs, ‘a lady’s cunning place,’ and then pokes me on my arm, as if I am supposed to laugh too. I say to him it just so happens I have a question about a lady’s cunning place and does he know about the bleeding of them. He asks why with a twist on his eyebrow, and I say no reason. You mustn’t go near a lady’s cunning place when it’s bleeding, he says, because the blood is poisonous, and can shrivel you where you would not want to be shrivelled, and burn like caustic, and he has heard it can blunt a knife blade too, and kill vegetables where they grow, and make the ground barren for seven years, and why, do I have a sweetheart now? And I say no, Jim, I am only asking because I heard about it. Is it often? As often as the moon is full, he says, but only when the woman is not with child, or suckling one, so not so often once they are married.

‘As often as the moon is full?’ I ask. ‘And at the same time?’ (The moon will be full tonight).

‘Why do you ask?’ he says, and then, ‘There is a sweetheart —’

‘No,’ I say, ‘no. Only — if there were a sweetheart —’

‘Ha!’ he says and spins all the way round on his heel, and whistles at the same time, and lands back in my face. ‘I knew it. Who is she?’

‘Nobody you know,’ I say. ‘Actually, less of a sweetheart and more of a — cousin.’

‘A cousin?’ He is suddenly larger in all directions, like a bird that fluffs its feathers up.

‘Yes, a cousin. And I let her stay with me —’

‘Am I to meet this cousin?’ He jerks his big head in several directions, as if looking out for a worm.

‘Listen —’ I say, but we are interrupted by a customer. Jim serves her with charm and complete attention, but the moment she has the oranges in her basket, he is right back on the scent.

‘Can I meet this cousin? Where is she?’

‘Gone back to my aunt,’ I say, and he deflates immediately, though his smile is still there like a smear of jam on his lips. I ask him, ‘And you are gone to Lady-heaven, are you?’

‘Coming back now,’ he says.

‘This cousin,’ I say, ‘I let her stay in my bed.’ He perks up and I add quickly, ‘Because there was nowhere else she could sleep. But Jim —’

‘No!’ he says having reached the end of my thought.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘There is blood in my bed.’

‘How much blood?’

‘A lot of blood.’

‘Tell Kate. Kate will clean it. She’s a good girl. She’ll know what to do.’

‘I can’t tell Kate. I can’t tell anyone. I secreted the girl into my room, and it will not be looked on kindly.’

‘Hmmm.’ He curls his shoulders and looks at the ground until it gives him an idea. Then he takes two oranges off the stall and puts them in my hands. ‘Stay here,’ he says, ‘juggle these.’

But I cannot juggle, so I just stand with two oranges in my hands while he goes off and talks to his friend George. After a while, coming back with a hop and skip,

‘Make water on it,’ he says.

‘You mean —’

‘Piss on it,’ he says. ‘That’s George’s suggestion.’

‘Does that remove blood?’

He laughs, ‘Who knows! It will dilute it at the least and at the most there’ll be something for Kate to clean that you can more easily explain.’

I say, ‘Is that the best you can do, Jim Coker?’

He says, ‘Tell them the truth and take the beating. It cannot be as bad as lying in a girl’s blood or your own piss.’

I deliver the message (some order of provisions) to Piccadilly, and run back as fast as I can. Which is not so fast. Physical exertion makes the cramping in my belly far greater, so I cannot keep a pace, and twice I have to find somewhere to stop and reposition the clout. I return to Demoiselle de Vaucresson’s house feeling utterly defeated by my body, which must make liquid at all costs, it seems, including smartly wiped away tears when Cook shouts at me for taking longer than I ought. All afternoon I do what is required of me by Mister Thomas, despite the dragging and clawing of some kind of demon inside me. All the while I am thinking what to do, but every path I think along ends badly. Part of me is so tired, so ready to lie down, that I would confess my sex if only that wouldn’t mean I would have no bed to lie upon. Through supper I use every ounce of myself to hold to a polite and interested face despite my sense of doom and the clawing in my belly. Long after the other staff have gone to bed, I stay in the scullery, busying my hands in some voluntary polishing in preparation for the return of the mistress in the morning and hoping the answer will arrive. The dragging ache doesn’t leave me any more than the memory of what is waiting for me when I get back to my room.

Sure enough, when I pull back the blanket, there it is - the now crusted brown nightshirt and the blood mapped out in its own horrible continent. Standing on one foot and then the other, I pull off my stockings, keeping an eye on it, but it doesn’t move. I stand there barefoot in the sad light of my own candle, staring. Lift the nightgown and take the candle closer to it to inspect how the blood has dried in — how cracked the gathering at the neck, and how impossible it will surely be to remove now. Then I don’t know what possesses me, besides something like divine guidance. Lifting the nightshirt up to my eye with one hand, I drift it into the candle in the other, and it starts to catch. To burn. The flames lick up it so quickly that I must drop it onto the bed — onto the patch indeed, that must most urgently be obscured, and is now being obscured by flame.

I watch for a moment, suffused with wonder. Before realising that this salvation of flame will be my ruination too if I don’t quickly put a stop to it. Though Kate sometimes forgets, the jug by my bowl has blessedly been refilled and I clutch it to my waistcoat. When I am sure that every last trace of blood has been burnt blacker than a pirate’s heart, I throw the water over it. But it doesn’t go out. The flames are dampened down in the centre, but at the edge, they are still burning. ‘Fire!’ I shout. ‘Fire!’ And here comes Cook in a very uncomely dressing gown, and Mister Thomas in his shirt tails. Cook has instinctively grabbed her wash jug on the way. She slooshes the contents onto the flames in small splashes, just where it is needed — Cook, I suppose, is the one of us most familiar with the ways of fire. Kate enters, belatedly, her hair all done up with rags, like she is preparing for her wedding day.

‘What’s the boy done now?’ she asks.

‘Only gone and burnt his own bed,’ says Cook.

‘Well he’s not having mine,’ says Kate.

‘No he’s not,’ says Cook, and they’re both of them talking over me as if I’m just as vanished as that part of the bed where the blood used to be. ‘He’ll be sleeping on a blanket on the floor tonight, and we’ll see what the mistress has to say about it in the morning.’

We stand gazing at the smoking, blackened hole in my bed.

‘What happened, boy?’ asks Mister Thomas.

‘My candle,’ I say. ‘It fell.’

‘It fell?’ says Cook, raising an eyebrow. She wafts her hand in front of her face and I notice the smoke in the air for the first time: how it has thickened and greyed the whole room.

‘I dropped it. I was startled.’

‘By what?’

I look about. There is so little in the room that there is almost nothing to blame. And then I see, on my own foot, a drop of dried blood. Sitting on my toe like a ladybird. I must tear my eye away from it before they see what I am seeing, and I throw my gaze to the floor in the far corner where I find, with relief, an answer. A couple of tiny droppings on the floorboards.

‘By a mouse!’ I say, with such relief that I fear I have made myself implausible. Cook says,

‘You really are some kind of ridiculous boy if you are startled by a mouse.’

Kate shakes her head and shuffles out, yawning.

Cook follows with a backward look that means to cut through me but I am wearing an expression that I know says nothing, no guilt and no knowledge. It is the look I learned to wear when Ma was drunk and accusing and I knew she’d take her hand to me no matter what and only this look would save it from being a birching. It’s a good look, well practised, and Cook sees in it only ignorance and sorrow at having nowhere to sleep and so she leaves Mister Thomas in there with me, trying to persuade the window open so that the smoke might have somewhere to stay the night, too, that isn’t my room.

‘Now it might be cold,’ he says, ‘but it’s better than breathing burnt straw. There we are. You leave that open for now. I’ll get you a new blanket.’

I move not a muscle. As though I am shocked, and in some ways I am, as I had no plan to burn my bed and might have put myself sorely in danger by doing so. And yet I did not feel my heart thump horribly, was not frightened and now have no feeling but victory, a victory I am trying not to allow to grow inside me, for fear it would crack a smile onto my face, which would never do, a smile being most inappropriate to one who has just cremated her mistress’s furniture to hide the fact she is hiding her sex. But when Mister Thomas at last returns with not one but two warm blankets, and one of them clearly the softer sort that the mistress herself uses on her bed, and shuts the door very tenderly as if not to startle me, I let myself dissolve into tears. I curl up next to my charred mattress. I do not sleep. Cannot, for wondering how to prevent my body from betraying me, or threatening to betray me, every month. And there is the more immediate problem of tonight, and tomorrow, and as many days as it takes for my excess fluids to be drained from my body. I disposed of one bloody clout in an alleyway and another in the fire when Cook left it unattended for a few moments. I have another, wrapped in brown paper, curled up on itself like a dead animal in the bottom of my trunk. I cannot run through Kate’s stock in this manner and must find some way of washing and drying my own, or stealing some stranger’s or God knows what.

Some time after midnight, I rise to pack a clean clout between my legs, and stand for many minutes looking out at the moon spilling its silver light over the rooftops, hardly noticing the chill of the open window until I begin to shiver with it. How do women bear this? Why, they speak to each other. Share secrets. But who will share secrets with me? The answer comes to me very coldly. There is only one person in the whole of London who knows I am a woman, and will not reveal me.

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Smoking Maketh the Man

Ma stops calling. At Christmas, she sends me a small gift, a ribbon, which is a poor gift for me, who cannot wear a ribbon. I give it to Kate, who is very taken with it. The message of its impersonal delivery I understand quite plainly. She was never the kindest mother to me, but to be disowned entirely is something hard to bear. Still, I bear it. I suppose there are many who are orphaned before thirteen, but fewer who are orphaned while their mother still lives.

But the past keeps tipping its hat to us, and doesn’t mind what we do with our calendar, or how much 1702 should be sliced like a fish’s fleshy body away from the eyeless head of 1701. The new year is never so far from the old. Only a few weeks later, I am taking a message to the Strand, going through Covent Garden for no good reason except that I like to see what is being traded, and I spy my mother across the market. Straight away I understand why she has stopped calling. Her belly’s blown up like there’s a whole theatre inside it. I watch her cross the cobbles cautiously, as though she might fall over at any minute, which I suppose she might with that enormous belly balanced over such a tiny pair of shoes. So, I think, we are to have another brother or sister, who will probably never meet either one of us, or even know that we came before. I don’t show myself to her. From the shape of her, she is carrying an entire orphanage.

Whereas from the shape of me, I am not a woman at all. However, Nature may yet give me away. A waistcoat may flatten my breasts, but it cannot flatten the female note of my voice. Fred the butcher’s boy is barely a year older than I am, and by no means as tall, yet his pipes are cracking between boyhood and manhood like a door that’s half kicked in. The bad music of two of him present at once in the same sentence — boy Fred and man Fred — has Kate stifling a smile with a hand. And when he has left, Mister Thomas says that’ll be me, too, before too long. And it must be, if I am to keep my warm bed. The taller I grow, the more folk will think it peculiar if I am still singing descant and not getting the words from a more gravelling place. But how to make it so?

Putting my mind to the problem for several days yields nothing. The thought keeps me awake for hours, and what sleep I have is disturbed by dreams of being cast out and made a vagabond. But on the morning I declare a deeper voice impossible and surrender myself to the natural outcome of losing my job and shelter, the answer presents itself. Leaning up against the doorframe, I am breathing out a sigh, watching a thrush bash a snail out of its shell in the kitchen garden and thinking of my inevitable un-shelling, when a deep voice growls from behind me to get my skinny arse inside and get the breakfast things on the table. I turn to see Cook’s munched-up mouth and the idea floods into me. I will take up tobacco! For isn’t it so that Cook, who always takes a pipe by the stove whenever she can, has a voice almost as deep as Mister Thomas’s? And isn’t it true that one of the fishwives back in Broxholme, Mrs Planter, whose voice could scrape barnacles off any ship’s hull, was also fond of tobacco? In an instant, I make it my mission to smoke.

This is harder than I would hope. Not because it is difficult to purloin the means: I filch a simple clay pipe from the back pocket of a gentleman at church, and Cook keeps her tobacco in a preserves jar on a high shelf that is easily climbed to. No, the difficulty is rather that I have no instruction, and sense I am doing it wrong. Without asking Cook, which is unwise at best, I have no means of learning how to do it correctly. I light the tobacco with a spill, sucking at the pipe to pull the flame down onto the tamped leaves. I smoke leaning out of the attic window when there is no one of consequence on the street below, sucking smoke into my mouth and releasing it in little puffs. But having observed Cook often enough, I am at a loss to know how she blows it through her nostrils, or holds it inside her lungs while she spouts some poisonous homily about young people’s morals. And despite two weeks of daily smoking, I know it is not reaching my voice at all.

Fortunately for me, Demoiselle de Vaucresson is exchanging messages with a tediously entitled man who lives at the Inns of Court. The man believes she will make him a very good wife, without considering whether he would make her a very good husband, and she must constantly rebuff his messages in order to prevent him embarrassing her. Unfortunately for Demoiselle de Vaucresson, he considers this a form of courtship, presumably having noted that women, like granite and other unyielding substances, can sometimes be worn down by persistent drips. Thus I am regularly required to take small unperfumed envelopes to Middle Temple, and often detained at that end for a cloying letter to be written in response, meaning that the time needed for my errand can be unpredictable. The quickest route takes me in both directions through Covent Garden, where the barrow boys, alongside calling out their wares in amusing ways, are sometimes given to smoking. It occurs to me that if I run the first and second legs of my errand, I can tarry in the market without seeming to have taken inordinately long, and perhaps gain some information that will be of some advantage to me in terms of forcing my voice to a deeper octave.

So it is that one somewhat frosty October morning, I sprint like a thing pursued to Covent Garden, then slow my steps and regain my breath as I turn the corner into it, so as not to draw too much attention. Before long I spy a group of boys smoking from a stubby pipe. I am afraid to approach so large a group, as they might pack-dog upon me. Instead I wander between the stalls, glancing at them from time to time until I see an older man break them up, and the friendliest looking one come back my way, a now empty pipe in one hand, and a couple of oranges — oranges! — juggled in the other. I marvel that a boy can be so free with something I have never so much as tasted, giving no thought to the chance that he might drop one of the fruits on the ground and spoil it. He sees me watching him and says,

‘What’s your game, eh?’

And when I don’t know how to answer,

‘What you looking at?’

‘The oranges,’ I say. He throws me one, and I surprise myself by catching it, but only clumsily and accidentally, squashing it with my wrist against my chest.

‘Have it,’ he says.

I put the orange in my pocket.

‘Nah, don’t be silly, give it back,’ he says. ‘My uncle’d kill me if I started giving em away.’

I hand it back to him.

He laughs. ‘Some kind of country idiot, are you? When someone gives you something, just scarper with it!’

‘Scarper with it?’

‘Of course. Take off. Show em your heels. Yes?’

None of his words are quite working in my head. I nod a half yes, and he mimes running with the top half of his body only, pumping his arms.

‘Well then,’ he says.

‘You want me to take off?’

‘Isn’t that what your kind do?’ he asks. My livery marks me out as a footboy, of course.

‘Not with other people’s property,’ I say, regaining some ground on the basis of the words ‘your kind’.

‘It’s your property now,’ he says. ‘Put it in your pocket. It’s a sample. Does your master or mistress want oranges? ‘

‘No,’ I say, putting the orange in my pocket, where it makes a rude bulge.

‘What’s your game then?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why did you say you were interested in my oranges?’

It is time for honesty, though I am afraid he is going to laugh at me.

‘I would like you to teach me to smoke,’ I say.

I am not wrong about the laugh, but he recovers himself quickly.

‘I see,’ he says. ‘I see. You got anything to do it with?’

I bring out the pouch of tobacco and hand it over.

‘All right then,’ he says, sniffing it. ‘This is not the best, but it will do.’ He feeds the white mouth of his pipe like it hasn’t been fed in an age, though I saw him smoking not a few minutes ago. He goes over to a friend of his who is selling roasted chestnuts, and uses a pair of ember tongs to set a tiny coal on the tobacco, sucking and puffing before putting the ember, and the tongs, back where he found them and returning to me. He sucks and puffs, then he offers it over, and I do the same. Only I know it’s not the same, and I suspect he is the kind of boy who will point that out to me, and sure enough he does, laughing himself onto his haunches.

‘Look at you, like a little kettle or something. You must suck it in,’ he says, taking the pipe out of my hands. ‘Breathe in! Suck it right down into your lungs, like this.’

He demonstrates, and the smoke disappears. He holds his breath for a few minutes, his eyes saying see? — and then he releases it in a long and satisfied stream. He passes the pipe back over.

‘Breathe in! Like it’s a big lungful of sea air or something. Breathe it right down inside you!’

I do as he says, and start coughing straight away.

‘That’s the bones of it,’ he says. ‘Try again!’

I try again, and cough again.

‘Takes practice,’ he says. I hand it back to him, thinking it better that I practice when he isn’t around to laugh at me. Yet I feel a little light-headed from the smoke, and warmed by his company. I start asking him about his business, and how long he’s been a barrow boy, and whether he likes it, and he tells me all about his uncle, whose barrow it is, and how the oranges never tally with the takings whether he takes them or not, and he gets beaten regardless, so he might as well give them to any person he likes the look of, but never a grown up. His uncle works in a slaughterhouse. His job is bringing death to the cows and sheep and pigs that are herded into London from the villages round abouts. He says he takes great pleasure in it. He doesn’t always like to do it fast. Sometimes he likes a slow cut, and watching the animal bleed very slowly, its eyes white and widening. And then he comes home, tallies up the takings from the orange barrow, and beats his nephew.

‘Do you not hate him for beating you?’ I ask, because I’ve never seen anyone talk about their beatings so cheerfully.

‘Pith and peel,’ he says. And then looking at my puzzled face he says, ‘You know, like an orange.’ (Though I don’t know, because I’ve never opened an orange: the one he gave me is getting hot in my pocket.) ‘Pith and peel on the outside, throw it away, means nothing. It’s not the fruit, is it. The fruit is inside. Now,’ he says, as if being reminded. ‘You might need a lemon. Do you have the money for a lemon?’

‘I do,’ I say, ‘but why would I need a lemon?’

‘Girls don’t like smoke on your breath if you’re trying to kiss them. Sucking on a lemon will do the trick. Or gargling salt water if you can’t abide lemons. Both, if you want to be sure of that kiss.’

He laughs, and I thank him. I ask him more questions and he answers them all. He tells me I’m the most interesting person he’s met in many a long day, though when I think about it he has done most all of the talking and doesn’t know a single thing about me, excepting that I am a footboy who cannot smoke.

The thought must occur to him at just the same time.

‘I’m Jim Coker,’ he says, and I tell him ‘Mark Read,’ and we shake on it like proper gentleman. And then I run off to the Inns of Court, deliver my mistress’s letter, collect her unwanted suitor’s reply, and run home again by a parallel route.

After meeting Jim Coker I practice smoking every evening, hanging out of the attic window in the bitter night air, until I can smoke like he does. Even though it makes my fingers brown and my spit bitter, I promise myself I will do it every day, to make my voice a more manly thing. Soon I don’t have to promise myself at all, because it’s something I need to do, quite as much as I need to eat or relieve myself.

My next question is how to be stronger. If I were to be a gentleman, in his powdered wig and waistcoat and box of snuff, I would likely not need to think about such a thing. But those in the trades or in service must use their bodies more, and here the men and women differ more greatly in what they can carry and lift. Though women have the strength to lift children and baskets full of laundry, they just as often puff and struggle, where men will lift whole hods of stone onto their shoulders, and one time I saw four men lift the corpse of a dead dray horse, on a tarpaulin, onto the back of a cart. I wouldn’t want there to be a time where a womanly weakness of arm might give me away. So I make it my business to offer as much lifting and carrying as the household needs. Even though it is not strictly my duty, and I must be careful not to make myself dirty, I fill the coal bucket as high as I can, hold it at arm’s length away from me, and take it unnecessarily up and down the stairs.

The months go on in this manner. I smoke and I carry the heaviest things I can manage, and on trips to and from Middle Temple, you will find me for at least a short time at Jim Coker’s barrow, so that in the gaps between customers I might listen to all he has to say on the world, and especially on girls, so I know better what a boy of my age should be thinking. I would take all of this from you, were you still in England. I would learn by your example as I always did. But Jim talks easily, and though he would never sense my thoughts as you did, I look to him as a kind of brother.

One afternoon late in the year, when Demoiselle de Vaucresson has gone to Norwich for the week without requiring me to accompany her, I tell him about the maps I studied in Captain Read’s library. About the names of those islands far to the west of us, and those things Mister Lampard said about the birds bright as fruit, and the summer all year long, and the whole barrels of sugar and spices, more precious than gold. And also what I have read about in Captain Read’s library about islands inhabited by men that have a second head growing out of their chests. And the diseases like sprue, and King’s Evil, which only come to sailors in hot climes, and no-one knows how or why.

‘I do not fancy going to sea,’ he says, and I feel sorry to have mentioned all the strange head-in-your-chest people or the diseases, because he might have been happy enough to think about the fruit-coloured birds and the all-year summer. He is juggling oranges as always in the hope of catching somebody’s eye to sell them to, and I am leaning against one of the uprights under the market awning, hands in my pockets, because the rain is coming down something fierce. Against the early-dark afternoon sky, the oranges look like balls of flame.

‘I expect those diseases are very rare,’ I say.

‘Maybe,’ he says, ‘but I do not like to be on the water.’

He drops an orange and it goes rolling under the cart. He bends to retrieve it, saying,

‘Ships can sink. And where would I be when they do but at the bottom of the ocean, where there are no oranges or pretty girls?’

As he straightens himself, he is eyeing a couple of those same pretty girls who were walking with a chaperone on the other side of the square, but are now sheltering under a large canopy.

‘You cannot swim,’ I ask?

‘For sure I cannot swim, and wouldn’t want to. Swimming’s for fishes.’

‘My brother and I learned for sport,’ I say. ‘To see what fell out of the sailor’s purses in the harbour. And keeping cool in the dew ponds. If there were ever a day when neither of us was working, I could teach you.’

‘I wouldn’t want to go to sea,’ he says again, looking me hard in the eye.

‘I’m not asking,’ I say, although he knows that I was, in a fashion.

‘You shouldn’t go either,’ he says, starting his juggling again. ‘Sailors are a rough lot, and unless you were as rough as the rest of them, or an officer, you’d get knocked about worse than I get from my uncle.’

‘Maybe I will be an officer,’ I say. ‘I have an education. My father was a captain.’

He catches all three oranges and squints me rotten.

‘I do believe, friend, that your father was a pirate.’ This much of my adopted story, I have told him.

I unpeel my spine from the upright and put my cupped hand a little way out into the torrent. Water is pouring off the edge of the awning and it fills quickly. He is jawing on about my villainous father, and how badness must run in my blood, being only halfway through a categorising of my low-born characteristics when I splash it in his direction.

‘Beefhead!’ he says, laughing. He spies a bucket by the flowerstall, nothing in it now but water, and as he darts the short distance to get it, I shout ‘Faster than any beefhead you’ve ever befriended!’ and sprint in the other direction, weaving through the covered stalls, looking for some way to outwit him, but knowing I won’t escape him unless I run all the way back to Albemarle Street. And that, of course, is not the game.

And here he comes, in a zig-zag line after me, hopping from this foot to that and only slightly disadvantaged by the bucket that he has in both hands, like a great big present he wants to give me, slopping itself out very slightly side to side. Both of us annoying stall-holders and customers in equal measure, I circle back and he circles back after me, all the time getting closer. Finally he has me cornered almost back where we began, and there’s only a table of vegetables between us and behind me only the street and the rain. So just as I see he’s ready to soak me, I leap back into the rain and soak myself, head to toe.

‘Damn you, beefhead,’ he says, ‘you take all the fun out of the chase!’ And chucks the bucket hard at me. I’m meant to catch it, but I’m looking at something else. Someone else, sheltering in a doorway. Ma. In a garish pink-and-green confection, so open at the neck that her breasts are more out than in. The bucket hits me hard in the belly and I fold to the ground, the breath knocked out of me.

‘Damn me!’ he says. ‘What sort of catching is that? You alright?’

It takes a couple of goes before the breath fills my lungs again. He comes out into the rain, puts out his hand to me where I lie.

‘Come on now, it’s nothing,’ he says. ‘Pith and peel!’

I nod, taking his hand, and he pulls me onto my feet and in under the awning. He follows my gaze. A gentleman approaches Ma in the doorway. He takes his coat off and makes a canopy of it, over his head. She joins him beneath it and off they go, down the street. ‘Not like you to be eyeing up the ladies,’ says Jim.

‘Not a lady,’ I say.

‘No, I can see that,’ he says, ‘lady of the night, not a lady —‘

‘My mother,’ I say, finishing the sentence before he holes the ship any further.

‘Blimey,’ he says.

‘I know what you’re thinking.’

‘What?’

‘Father a pirate, mother a whore.’

‘No such thing.’

‘I was respectable once. She was a seamstress, and he was a sea captain with a letter of marque.’ (Skipping the pebble of truth over the cold waters of the real story, where my father was a common sailor, of the kind that likes to clonk women on the head.)

‘Then the lesson is watch your step,’ says Jim. ‘How are the mighty fallen, and other good bible verses I’ll wager.’

He sees that I’m shivering.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We can’t stand here wet through. No-one’s buying in this rain. I’ll ask Alf to keep an eye on the barrow. Let’s nip into the Three Tuns for a half. Dry out a bit. They have a good fire there.’

But even with the good fire, something doesn’t feel right in me. That half of ale sits wrong in my belly, as if the hops were off. Or as if that bucket bruised me more than I realised.

‘Hey chin up,’ says Jim, ‘she’s not your mother anymore, is she, she’s given you away for a servant.’

But his cheeriness doesn’t get to the insides of me, where it might do me some good. The ache in my belly gets wider and deeper, and I don’t tell him, because he will feel bad about throwing the bucket at me, even though it was my fault for not catching it.

When I let myself in through the scullery door, Cook is scowling at herself in the back of the ladle. She startles as I enter and hangs it on its hook with a motion and look that suggests it’s been badly behaved.

‘What is wrong with you, sneaking in so?’

‘Nothing is wrong with me,’ I say.

‘You are wrong there,’ she says. ‘And you can wipe that smile off your face, too.’

‘I’m not smiling,’ I say. Whatever’s been painted on my face by this belly pain that has grown deeper since the bucket and the bad ale cannot be a smile.

‘You might have fooled Mrs Fredericks, but you can’t fool me. You’re no kind of gentleman.’ She says this with a flourish, and fear pricks my heart for the seconds it takes me to realise that she is casting aspersions on my class, not my pretended sex. She places a cleaned cooking pot back on its shelf. ‘Don’t you know the King is Dead?’

‘How dead?’

‘How dead?’ she says. ‘Very dead, I should say. Dead enough for a funeral.’

‘From being thrown off his horse two weeks ago,’ says Mister Thomas, coming in for his supper.

‘Yes,’ says Cook, ‘who knew you could die from a broken collarbone? All from the horse stumbling on a molehill, too. Killed by a mole! To think a blind rat could manage what all those awful Jacobite assassins couldn’t.’

‘Who is to be king now then?’ I ask.

‘That’s the very worst of it,’ says Cook.

‘Another Dutchman?’ I ask.

‘Worse than a Dutchman. A woman.’

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The Bardo, an undisclosed number of years ago.

‘Hello. I’ve come for a life, please.’

Derek — for that’s the name on his friendly-fonted name badge — looks up from his paperwork.

‘A human life?’

‘Yes, a human life.’

He surveys me quizzically. When I say me, I mean the holographic shimmer of my last incarnation, fixed at my chosen age of 36.

‘You’re sure. You wouldn’t want to be, say, a horse? Much loved, empathic, powerful, gallops around fields in the sunshine.’

‘Isn’t there a risk I’d be ridden?’

‘Fair.’ He snaps his fingers and a piece of paper appears between them. He scans for a moment. ‘It says here you like swimming and you’re irritated by the lack of gender equality.’

‘The 16th century is ridiculous. They’re still debating whether women have souls.’

‘Well humans have all this “society” nonsense, you know. That’s why I’m asking if you’ve considered other options. Have a rest from it all. What about seahorse? The male does the pregnancy and childcare. Pick female and you can just float around looking lovely.’

‘Swimming is great, but not as a full-time job. As for “float around looking lovely,” is that a meaningful existence? I was thinking something less likely to be gobbled up by a crab or smashed against coral in rough seas. Something with more agency.’

‘A handsome Sumatran tiger?’

‘Too endangered.’

‘A chimpanzee?’

‘If I’m going for primate, I might as well go for most evolved, you know?’

‘Bonobo?’

‘No, human. Come on. Come on. Give me another go. I promise I won’t kill anyone this time.’

‘Alright, alright.’

He manifests a manila folder and starts shuffling through it.

‘How about this? A scientific couple in England, both of them brainy, good-looking, and musical. High school sweethearts who met in the Madrigal group. They have everything going for them. Twin boys already, so you wouldn’t have the burden of being the eldest. You’d pretty much be left to do your own thing. The last generation of free-roaming children.’

‘What year?’

‘It’s the dawn of the Space Age. Your future father is working on ceramic components for rocket engines.’

‘Ooh. That sounds rather cool! So, “It IS rocket science”!’

‘You bet!’

‘How’s equality going?’

‘Not great right now, but by the time you’re twenty, vastly improved and by the time you’re thirty-six — your favoured age, right? — the UK will be pretty much there on all fronts: gender, race, sexuality, disability…’

‘What’s the catch?’

‘Oh, you know.’ He scratches the place where his ear used to be. ‘The usual human stuff.’

‘Want to be more specific?’

‘You know how it gets a bit messy when every member of a species has agency, language, and advanced tool use. Plus this equality you’re so keen on…’

‘What?’

‘Well, it’s going to mess up your life. Just a little bit.’

‘In what way?’

‘For a start, your mother’s going to hear about Women’s Lib.’

‘And?’

‘She’s going to want some for herself. Liberation.’

‘And that’s good, right?’

‘Of course, of course. We’ll all be very happy for her when she stops crying herself to sleep.’

‘But?’

‘Sorry, that’s as much as I can tell you.’

‘Really.’

‘Spoilers. But it’s a ride.’ The look he gives me burrows into my joy like a worm.

Do I really want a ride? Is it only that the Bardo wears a little thin after a while? For a while after transition, the people who loved you and miss you bring you to mind, and you get to taste life through their eyes, ears and tongues, and whisper to them in their sleep. Then one by one, they re-emerge by your side. It’s joyful to see them. But soon there’s no one on Earth to summon you to their senses.

And sure, a human life is the bumpiest of roads, and I’ve never known a smooth one. But that’s what you sign up for. Expansion. And isn’t a little pain worth the pleasures that a human life affords? I’d do anything to lie in a meadow in June watching clouds dissolve into blue at their edges, cool grass against my back, the thready melody of a skylark high above me. Anything to taste strawberries and cream again, with a sprinkling of sugar.

‘That’s great,’ I say. ‘It’s a ride I’m after.’

‘Alright,’ he says, shuffling his papers. ‘If you’re sure.’

Something about his tone makes me nervous.

‘I mean, unless there’s another human life in your file there that’s a little easier.’

‘This is the only available slot that suits your growth goals. Take it or leave it. Or, you know. Take the tiger gig. Work out some of your anger issues.’

‘No, it’s okay. Oh, listen, can I be a writer again? I like being a writer.’

‘Of course. You’ll be born one. Know it to your bones.’

‘Excellent.’

He hands me the statutory disclaimer. I sign it.

Monday, this week.

‘Hello. Bardo customer service?’

The line is quiet for a while. Then I hear, in my own voice,

‘Yes?’

‘Is that — Derek?’

‘It is.’ My eyelids tingle, then twitch rhythmically: Derek’s version of two-factor authentication.

‘Listen, Derek, I’m not sure this is the life I ordered.’

‘Really?’

‘I mean, didn’t we discuss my passion for equality? You said things would get a lot better.’

‘And they did, didn’t they. By the time you were thirty-six—’

‘Yes, lots of progress, but now we’ve gone backwards. Massively, rise-of-the-far-right backwards.’

‘Indeed.’

‘And I thought I was guaranteed to be a writer.’

‘Well, you are. You’ve got a poem on the UK exam syllabus, you’ve won prizes, your debut novel was a huge critical success and —’

‘and now the market’s collapsed, and unless you’re on TV, publishers only want thirty-year-old romantasy writers with half a million TikTok followers.’

‘Have you thought of self-publishing?’

‘Jeez, Derek, not you too.’

Derek laughs. ‘Just joshing. But you know, if you will insist on caring about language at the sentence level and not slotting into genres and tropes and beats, what do you expect?’

‘But I wanted to be a writer of — you know, thoughtful stuff. Books that stay with the reader for years after they’ve read them. Now the only thing that matters to publishers is your ability to create viral ten-second videos.’

‘I never guaranteed the future environment. Just the one you were born into. I warned you it was going to be a ride.’

‘So — I wondered if I could still return it. This life. Swap it for a different one. One a bit more in line with my goals.’

My big toe vibrates a little. A surge of energy, as though extra team members have joined the call.

‘Your growth is completely in line with your goals. Exceptional actually. From where you started, we’re all very impressed. You’ve exceeded expectations.’

‘But I’m crashing out here, Derek. On the physical side. I’m really not where I thought I’d be, after all this time. So, as I say, if I could return this life, and get one with a little more …’ — I’m fishing around, but I’m going to have to use the obvious, embarrassing word — ‘… success.’

A second of silence suggests Derek is reaching for diplomacy.

‘This life you’d like to return…’

In the gap he leaves, you could plant a rose bush.

‘Yes?’

A couple of rose bushes. Finally, the words arrive, curled at the edges by a poorly-suppressed smile.

‘It’s little used, isn’t it? Our no-quibble 90-day return policy is very generous, and we can stretch it if there’s a manufacturing defect, but — I hope you won’t mind me saying — you’ve left it rather late.’

‘I don’t think that’s exactly fair. It’s taken me this many years to learn to meditate and get a clear connection.’

‘You still had your invisible friend until you were six. He was your direct line.’

‘I was still happy when I was six! I thought I’d be rich and famous by the time I was thirty.’

‘Children are wonderful, aren’t they? Such dreamers! Such delightful bundles of misgivings and innocence.’

‘Listen—’

Derek laughs, not unkindly. ‘This is the ride!’ he says. ‘This is what you signed up for.’

‘Setting up an Etsy shop to make ends meet?’

‘Of course! Why not! What resilience! What an inspiration you can be to others. How to live a creative life by branching out into mugs and T-shirts. Adapt and survive! It’s glorious!’

‘Hmmm…’

‘And when you’re dead, what an obituary! It’s like you lived six or seven lives already, and here’s another one! Virtual shopkeeper.’

‘Plus, I’m in a lot of pain. My shoulder’s buggered.’

‘I’m sorry, but that’s what happens when you take an old model like yours and fill your joints with repressed rage.’

‘Repressed rage?’

‘About your writing career. About the rise of short-form video and the collapse of literary fiction.’

‘Ah.’

‘Let it go, that’s my advice.’

‘Look, can I speak to your manager?’

‘I’m afraid she’s really busy right now. There’s a lot to coordinate. Seeding brilliant ideas to combat climate change, the rise of misogyny, racism, homophobia, violence—’

‘Yes, I understand, but—’

‘I’m hanging up now. We’ll send some more ideas through for the shop. Did you like the ones we sent already? There are dozens in the pipeline.’

‘Derek—’

The meditation timer trills; the connection drops.

Damn.

Well, if you like pithy or quirky words on T-shirts and mugs, my shop’s here. And yes, I finally got around to creating several versions of the T-shirt I promised in November ‘24. I stand by my words.

Fear not. The otters are coming.

The inspiration, unlocked from the archive:

A reader asked me this week why they haven’t received any free chapters of the novel since late May. I guess some of you missed the memo! I get a chunk of unsubscribes from my ‘free list’ each time I post, so twice a week was sending me further away from the 10,000 subscribers that publishers want to see. Thus, free subscribers get the link to your weekly chapter at the bottom of Friday posts. Do read as soon as you can, because they get locked down after 5 weeks.

Read Why I Stole Your Life, the “Booker-worthy” fictional autobiography of the real-life soldier and pirate Mary Read

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A Footboy is Not So Lowly as He Sounds

In my innocence, I think the house mine. That fine stone house, with its slow-ticking parlour clock and its grand walnut table. For am I not Mrs Read’s grandson? Am I not her only heir? The old woman did not consider she might be about to get into bed for eternity. Though she had thought us muddy sorts, my Ma fit only for scrubbing, and me too much my mother’s son, in her last weeks she had come to calling me dearest, to pinching my cheek and ruffling my hair. In short, she had changed her mind, but not her will.

Shortly before the funeral, distant cousins arrive from Northumberland. There are pests in the house, they say, and might I vacate the premises while it is cleaned? Young as I am, I understand them.

So along with my clothes, I take one tiny book from Captain Read’s library that will hardly be missed, about the West Indies, which is where I place you, brother, because it is so much more heartening to imagine than your skeleton clattering about the pebbles on the seabed of the English Channel. The day after I move out, my mother meets with a solicitor in his offices, who makes it plain to us that her late husband, and therefore her son — he says this so markedly that I wonder whether he really believes the word — were, and are, disinherited.

How quickly money runs away, when needed. Soon we are reduced to stale ha’penny loaves and the cheapest tallow candles. Ma says there is nothing for it but to go into service. Not her, because she is sure she doesn’t have the temperament for it, but I am young, which they will take to mean biddable, and grand folk prefer the more affordable wage that youth allows. I am to ‘live in’, she says. She has her own plan for herself, she says. What plan, she says not, but I know she will not be returning to needle and thread, on account of her eyes and fingers. I am to help her out until she is on her feet again.

Mrs Fredericks has often mentioned which big house is hiring (always with an opinion) and is not unhappy to receive me on her doorstep and offer advice. Poor thing, she says, cooing me in, giving me a biscuit. It’s a shame, she says, that some people have no morals when it comes to money, because these people were not so quick to come to the house when the old lady was alive, but being in service is a respectable calling, and boys from good families do well in livery. She tells me that an unmarried French lady in Mayfair, name of Demoiselle de Vaucresson, is looking for a footboy, her last having run away to join the army. This being the war that may be about to begin any day now between England and France, and all manner of other countries, which is exciting footboys all over London, who fancy themselves for soldiers, thinking they might come back from war with a scar to impress the ladies, and a full belly on the King’s provisions, and a fat purse, and perhaps a medal or two. And maybe some part of themselves lopped off, although she does not suppose they are imagining that. The Grand Alliance has been reformed, armies all over Europe are recruiting young men, and it will not take very much to set them all at each other’s throats, for the fun of it as much as anything, but I mustn’t think of joining them. I asked after Adisa and she says Charles? Charles has been dismissed for taking off a glove. She herself is only there by the grace of God.

Footboys earn two shillings a week. My duties are all sorts of things that are not meet for women and too lowly for butlers, but I am given a fine blue coat for greeting guests in, or serving at table, and another for everyday wear, the whole uniform including undergarments, as Demoiselle de Vaucresson does not like her servants to be tatty on any level, including those levels she cannot see. I am given the room that I was jokingly promised only a few weeks ago by Adisa, an attic room with a chimney running through it, which at the time I take up the position is unbearably hot, being as it is June and there being only the smallest window in the gable end, and the cook, who is known throughout the household only as Cook, is given to cooking from dawn until dusk, preparing not only meals but all kinds of fancy pastries, meaning that the chimney barely cools down before it is heated up again.

Nevertheless I am glad to have a roof over my head, and a bed of my own, since I am getting too large to share with my mother. Though I had so recently had a much wider bed with a counterpane with burning birds embroidered upon it, which meant something to Mrs Read, in the between times I have been shoved up with my mother again, in lodgings that are crawling black on their inside walls and home to all manner of insects. Thus, I am glad to havw something dry and warm (even if somewhat too warm) that houses, besides myself, only a few spiders.

The butler of the household is a Mister Thomas, who is a man born in the marshes. He has a thick accent and a crude laugh, though he squashes it all when he is butlering. Even though Demoiselle de Vaucresson has more than once caught him in his real voice, she is too French to notice the difference between the two Mister Thomases, only noting that one of them she can easily translate and the other one makes her question the functioning of her ears. Mister Thomas is the only person that Cook will recognise as being above her. By her reckoning she is above everyone else, including all other Cooks, and secretly including Demoiselle de Vaucresson, who after all by Cook’s tongue is one of the Filthy French, and not to be thought superior just because she has a deep purse.

Cook is a mean woman, given to lashing out with a wooden spoon as I go by. The minute she learned I was the late Mrs Read’s grandson she began calling me Lord and Master, as though Lords and Masters get sent out into the road to collect horse dung for the herb garden, or are made to scrub pans until their hands go the colour of peonies. Only on the second week do I understand from Mister Thomas that these are not my duties at all, and that I am something like an under-butler, who must sometimes move furniture for Kate to clean behind, and sometimes carry things too heavy for Cook, but am not what Mister Thomas calls a General Dogsbody. When I’m fully grown I will be a Footman, and that is no inconsiderable thing. As a footboy I must run messages, and assist Mister Thomas to serve meals, and I must accompany my mistress’s coach when she is visiting. On all occasions I may accept vails, which are coins pressed into my hand by Demoiselle de Vaucresson’s wealthy friends, and these alone have tripled my wages.

Nevertheless Cook continues to try it on. She takes special delight in giving me jobs that take me down into the cellar, because she knows it is full of rats. It is not only me she is mean to. She calls the housemaid, whose name is Kate, Miss Mustard, which leaden words (though I don’t understand them) have the effect of casting Kate’s eyes to the floor. She likes very much to talk about people’s body parts, so long as she is certain there will be no penalty. She would never dare say that Demoiselle de Vaucresson, whom she calls The Lady of the House, has a scraggy little arse (which she says to Kate), or any kind of arse at all. She would never comment on a gentleman’s legs but she is happy to comment on mine. She has tried more than once to pull my pizzle (as she likes to put it), but each time I dodge out of her way and she laughs. When she has put supper in the oven, she sits by the range on a three-legged stool, brings out a pouch of tobacco and a pipe from her skirts, holds a lit taper to the end and sucks, making big smacking noises with her froggy lips. She says it is good for her lungs. One time she blows smoke in my face as I go past and I see her on her deathbed, the sheets grey with yellow stains, and Cook coughing blood into a flannel and crying for the daughter she had who died as a baby. The vision so arrests me that I stop dead in front of her, and I suppose I must be looking at her strangely, for she startles and says ‘Get away from me now!’

Demoiselle de Vaucresson does not know me to be the grandchild of Mrs Read, since my mother told me to say nothing. Not because she knows it to be a lie — she has spread the tale so widely in London that I suspect she now believes it herself — but because she feared the Demoiselle, armed with this knowledge, would be unlikely to hire me for the reason that I might be ‘above myself’, though it is surely as impossible for me to be ‘above myself’ as it is for me to be on two floors of the house at once. But though Demoiselle de Vaucresson is ignorant of my thwarted prospects, Cook knows, because Mrs Fredericks told her. Cook is delighted to know, and in playful moods refers to me as Master Less, so that one time Kate said ‘Master Less?’ she said ‘Master Less-Than-He-Was!’ followed by a cackle of laughter.

Ma calls at the kitchen door every Saturday for my wages. I wonder when she will ever get back on her feet. Or whether she has, since her clothes are getting fancier. Silk bodices can’t be had from a footboy’s wages, and no-one can dress like a lady on six pounds a year. But I know she is resourceful.

I say as much to Mister Thomas, and tell him about sleeping under the gentleman’s bed in Exeter when I was a child, and he roars himself hoarse with laughter and says, yes indeed, those gentlemen’s beds can be very bouncy, yes indeed, and I feel heat come to my cheeks even though I am not at all sure what he thinks is so funny. When I say he must have been a very kind gentleman, because he gave my mother three sovereigns, Mister Thomas says he must have been a very sorry gentleman, to wake up and find himself so light in the purse, because that wasn’t at all what you would pay for a cuddle with a woman you met in a hostelry. That is when I understand him. I tell Mister Thomas that my mother is not a whore, and his smile collapses into something more serious and he says of course not, she is a woman without recourse, which makes me hope he thinks better of her. But the next time she calls, I compare her clothes to the clothes of the women that walk up and down Marybone with nowhere to go.

Whatever Ma is doing to put herself in fine dresses, she is doing it very well. When she sees me now, she pats me on the head, as though I am an animal she is very fond of, but she does not ask me how I am keeping, or whether I like running messages and serving pastries so that she can take away my earnings to put a feather in her hat.

Then I get a fleabite. Fleabite, I am sure it is, except for it stays, making a great lump of itself. Then another comes up on the other side to match it. Now I know these are not fleabites at all, but the end of my being a footboy unless I am careful. Until this time it has been easy to be a boy. Never do I empty myself in a public place. Never am I bathed by anyone but myself, so it’s simple enough to conceal what isn’t there. In looks I have always been enough like a boy to be mistaken for one, and in manner I have learned to adopt more fully the spirit of the name I go by. You, I think, wouldn’t cower in the attic and wait to be called: you would be dressed and downstairs as soon as you were woken, seeing who was about, and what, if anything, you could pilfer. And you, I think, would not accept that Cook could smack you on the legs with a wooden spoon as you passed, but would, for revenge, toy with her condiments, and put a little mustard powder in her morning restorative, not so much to make her sick, but enough to ensure that it never tasted right on any day she had made free with her utensils. You wouldn’t think twice about stealing a plum from the table when Cook was in the larder getting flour to make a pie, and popping it straight into your mouth, and using only nods and shakes of the head until you could slip out of the room and birth it from your mouth like a hairless purple puppy, and bite into it with relish for the sheer taste of liberty.

Living the name that everyone calls me has made it easy to have a boy’s ways, a boy’s wiles, a boy’s boldness with things that don’t belong to him. So when those two fleabites that aren’t fleabites come calling a chill runs through me that could freeze the great wide bounty of the Thames. I flatten the bumps with my hands, but can hardly walk around all day holding on to myself like a woman caught bathing. I have no wish to be discovered.

Fortunately my uniform includes a waistcoat. I note by experiment that the fabric is so firm that my bumps are perfectly flattened when the waistcoat is buttoned. I only hope I will not grow so bosomy that it will not disguise me. The simple reason being this. The more I see of the relative freedoms of girls and boys, of women and men, the more I knew I must turn from boy to man, and be a man all of my days.

For example. Only girls and women have babies, and by all accounts that is a fearsome thing, worse than getting a lead bullet shot into your belly by a musket, worse than being entirely run over by a dray cart, and in the same manner, as often as not, fatal. But all women must bear it, because thousands of years ago a woman bit into an apple. Why Eve’s sin should be visited on all of us I do not know, and it makes as good a reason as any to go to church with my ears blocked with lint. I have heard from the men that sometimes visit Kate and smoke outside the back door when I am chopping kindling that having babies, and the thing that leads to having babies, is all that women are good for. As a rule girls are not trained in a trade, or in writing (to be clerks), or in investing (to be bankers), because all that matters about them are their body parts, and especially their womb, and how many children it will make their husband. Easily one time in ten, having a baby will make you die, which is a sorry end to a sorry beginning. So many men have three or four wives because they have killed the first two or three by putting a baby in them.

Second example. As noted before, men make the world. They make all the things in the world that have use and will last, and the women, if they make anything at all, make things of no consequence. Every utensil I use, every chair that I sit on, every carriage in the streets, every sword, every ship, every house, every castle, was made by men. Women make food, which is digested into dung. They make clothes, which are worn into rags. Higher class women embroider pointless patterns on cushions — see Mrs Read and her crocuses — or worse, they make ‘samplers’ which demonstrate various stitches to no great purpose, since they will never be employed as a seamstress. No wonder men consider women to be useless except in the matter of making babies. Babies is the one thing women make that lasts for a lifetime (though some babies’ lifetimes are short), and have some utility in the world, if they are boy babies — but this is nothing due to the prowess of women, since the ability is natural and not in their control. Female dogs and rats and spiders are as good as spawning young as women are, better, mostly, because (I think) they do not so often die of it. Where everything that men make sets them apart from the animals, the one lasting thing made by women puts us squarely among them.

Third example. Men may have adventures. A man who has adventures, no matter what their nature, is a hero. If any woman dares to have an adventure, even so small an adventure as an unaccompanied excursion to the wrong part of the city, she is deemed either a ‘fallen woman’ or a disgrace, whose adventure must never be mentioned. If her adventure involves consorting with a man to whom she isn’t married, so much the worse. Whereas a man may sail across the ocean, may murder people in the name of his country, may steal gold in the name of his queen, and he will be called a hero, and may be given a medal, a knighthood, or a seat in the parliament making laws to his own advantage. A man’s smallest adventure will be celebrated in a tavern, enlarged upon and told a dozen times, and no-one will think any worse of him for doing so. A woman’s largest adventure must be kept under her tongue, and sit there like a sugared almond she fears to suck upon. It seems that shopping is as much of an adventure as a good woman will admit to herself, or to polite company. Mrs Read called going to her milliner’s ‘an expedition’.

For all these reasons, I am determined to keep the advantage of being male. Even if it is not so much advantage as I would have being the son of a vicar, or a clerk, or a gentleman, it is far more advantage than the daughter of any of those, to find I can move freely around the world, and make my mark upon it in some lasting fashion. And not to be thought less than anyone of my size and upbringing, or to be considered simple in the head, or weak in the arms, for the lack of some extra flesh between the legs. For this reason I will swallow the small restriction of wearing a waistcoat, regardless of the weather, to make my chest look more like Adam’s and less like Eve’s.

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“Who were you actually with?” he asks.

In a blink of memory, I’m there. Standing in the lightless hallway, having just closed the oak front door of our country cottage, my swimming bag hooked over one shoulder, my hair still damp. He’s been waiting for me to return to the house. He’s working from home all the time now, so he can keep an eye on my movements.

“What do you mean? I was swimming. There’s chlorine in my hair. Smell my hair.”

I’ve started swimming three times a week to lose the baby weight. To start feeling better about myself, to counter all the ways he grinds me down.

“Easy to fake,” he says.

I want to get past him, into the kitchen, put my costume in soak. But he’s blocking the doorway.

“Fake how?” I ask. “You think I paid to get into the leisure centre, dipped my head in the pool, and then went and met someone?”

“There you go. You’ve just admitted how it’s done.”

“What? No! That’s not—”

“I know what you’re up to. I know what happened in Cambridge.”

A chill travels the length of my spine. But no. He’s faking. He has to be. He’s trying to trick me into a confession. No way he could know about that. Unless—

“I’ve read your emails,” he says.

The emails I deleted. Definitely deleted before emptying the Trash folder. And it wasn’t like he had my password, either, no way he could have guessed it and got into my account.

So I thought. But I was wrong.

What I did in Cambridge was have a one-night stand. My life was sexless and joyless. A grind of childcare and housework I hadn’t agreed to. Refusing pleasureless sex with a man who now physically repulsed me was the only tiny bit of control I’d retained in a relationship where everything that mattered to me had been stripped away.

Sex was one of those things. I was thirty-two. My high libido had nowhere to go. A desire for pleasure couldn’t be met by the impotent, beer-bellied, chain-smoking ghoul who had tricked me into being his servant.

He’d said he’d kill me if I left, and I believed him. But his treatment of me left me ever-more hungry for love, and its physical placeholder, sex. I was ravenous for someone to treat me with respect, or care about my pleasure. But he’d moved us to the country, where I couldn’t meet men. Where I was never without the kids that he’d lied me into having. A place where everyone knew your business.

The final summer I was with him, an old English teacher of mine got a residency at a Cambridge College. We’d been emailing to and fro for a while, after I’d sent him some poems: I was trying to get my writing off the ground again, after eight years.

“Come and see me for the day,” he said. “We’ll talk poetry and go punting. I can get you a room overnight at the college, dinner with the Fellows.” After years of brain-numbing housewifery, it sounded like bliss. But I knew, one hundred per cent, that Walter wouldn’t let me get away if I told him. It had to be secret. So I arranged a weekend for me and the kids at my Mum’s house in Colchester, just forty miles from Cambridge. And then asked my Mum would she be alright to look after the kids for 24 hours, but please not tell Walter, because he gets so jealous. She agreed.

[*Walter’s name has been changed to protect the innocent (me).]

That night in Cambridge, after pass-the-port, Old Teach and I went clubbing. Expressly so I could find a young man to share the room he had booked in my name. We’d been talking all day about my miserable life, and the sex I wasn’t having. The pleasure I surely deserved. So he took me out to scout for a man who was willing.

And we found him. A PhD student with a climber’s body and an appealingly shy way about him, who seemed happy to serve. I’d laid out the conditions: no strings, first names only. It was just a rare treat, like a pineapple Danish. Followed by a cuddle, and a sleep in his arms, and then gone.

This was what Walter now knew, from hacking into my hard drive.

When you delete a file and empty the trash — I found out that day — your data can still be recovered. It’s still there on the drive, at least until that part of the drive is needed for storage and rewritten. My ex and I were both programmers, yes, but all my nous was in the coding. I never got into the architecture underneath. But clearly, he could, and did.

Coercive controllers keep tabs on you any way they can. They’ll track your phone and your car, set up hidden cameras, install keylogging software to steal your passwords. So any help or relief you seek carries risk. Which is why the PDF I made — Is This Abuse: A Pattern Recognition Guide For Women Who Aren’t Sure — downloads with a filename of ‘Slow Cooker Favourites’.

You can store that pretty safely on your hard drive without it being opened. It contains eight different behaviour types with checklists, to help you be certain that no, it’s not you; no, you’re not overreacting. If you check it out, make sure to erase your browser history after.

Paid subscribers can get it free at the bottom of this page, to keep for yourself or pass to a friend. Anyone who might be slowly waking up from the slow, mad misery of coercive control.

I have a different husband now. He started as a friend-with-benefits and proved good in the sack. He’s a goof who makes me laugh. He learned to cook, and he’s amazing; he makes dinner every night like my own private chef. He does the laundry and food shop. He raised our daughter while I worked, and he’s the kind of man who will drive a hundred miles to help someone in need.

My ex called me a whore. Told our kids I was a whore. But I know now how faithful I can be. I know the value of a man who makes me happy, does his share, and treats me with respect.

Men who control women are weak-ass men. Threatened by clever and capable women, they try to prove their masculinity to other men through trophy-hunting and dominance. They hook into vulnerabilities our childhoods left. They leverage the insecurities that a patriarchal culture started weaving into our fabric from the moment we were born.

But we are waking up. We know our worth, and cannot be controlled.

Now back to the glorious powers of words…

Read Why I Stole Your Life, the “Booker-worthy” fictional autobiography of the real-life soldier and pirate Mary Read

This week’s free chapter:

Over to you:

• Silly questions are good questions.

• Serious questions are also good questions.

• Or just share your own experiences. It helps all of us know we were never alone. We are legion.

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Unregulated Emotion is as Deadly as the Pox

Calamity arrives on Mrs Read’s doorstep in the shape of a man. By the state of him, vomited out by the sea. Such a rotten-looking man. Hair like a mop for ashes, and beard tatty as a rook’s nest, and half an arm gnawed off by something only half hungry. How it might have chewed through to his bone I cannot imagine, as his skin has the brown toughness of a pair of boots. His uneaten arm ends in tree root fingers gnarled around a cup of brandy. A cup, I note, and not one of Mrs Read’s fancy glasses, but a cup from the kitchen which I’m guessing Charles knew to be the right container from the barely detectable wideness of Mrs Read’s eyelid or from a tightness in her upper lip, which Charles well knows how to read as a silent instruction in matters of household deportment. I arrive to survey the scene through the crack of the door as Charles finishes pouring the liquid into that cup, with the man thanking him in a voice unnaturally loud, saying he had the shakes very bad and couldn’t do without it and that a whole succession of ships’ doctors had prescribed him brandy though he had generally only been able to find rum. He really does look like something about him is going off, and has a smell about him too, the way fish does when it’s been in the sun a few hours. Plenty of sailors came in and out of the harbour at Broxholme, and some of them were worn at the edges, if we were their first stop after a long voyage. But never have I seen any like this one. His trousers are half a pair of brown moleskins and half a pair of green pantaloons, though I can’t be sure he has chosen the better leg of each, since the moleskins have a hole at the knee, and the pantaloons, as I notice when he turns his cup hand to Charles, have a tear across the situpon.

Ten minutes earlier: Mister Rotard standing by the steps and a strange noise leaking through the window of the front parlour. Mister Rotard suggests with his eyes that we take the basement steps. We enter into the kitchen to find Mrs Fredericks standing dead still, floury hands crab-crouched on the edge of the table like Lady Upton about to play the harpsichord, and eyes raised to the ceiling to aid her ears. Seeing myself and Mister Rotard enter, she jolts into action, washes her hands at the tap, dries them on a cloth, and tells us to wait, heading upstairs towards the source of the noise. Mister Rotard does as he is told, sitting himself down at the kitchen table. I stay on my feet, obeying the same command for as long as five minutes, but finally am too curious to wait, and dodge his attempt to snatch my wrist, and head towards the noise.

The source of the noise is plainly Mrs Read. From the view afforded by the hinge-gap of the half-open door, she is prostrate on her long couch, half buried under a crooked arm and three of her cushions, making a sound like the wind through a crack in the world. The half-armed man drinking brandy out of a kitchen cup has brought her some great sorrow.

Mrs Fredericks has had the whole situation from Charles, who has several times gone in and out. She whispers what she knows. The sailor handed Mrs Read a letter written by your father several months ago. He served on Captain Read’s ship, and now he is finally returned to London with the letter he has come to deliver for the promise — for the letter offers this promise — that he will be rewarded for delivering the news. Mrs Read is in floods all over her cushions, weeping like she been hoarding her sobs for the day when they might be needed and now has the whole larder of tears to get rid of as quickly as possible, before they moulder away. But the reward has not yet surfaced, or the sailor would not be standing there waiting for the storm to subside, and a purse to rise out of it.

Had Mrs Read not been in spate she would have shouted him off her carpet, because even now one of his shoes (the one boasting a strange white toe peeking out of it like a mouse from a skirting board) is trespassing upon the Not To Be Trodden Upon, as though his feet long for something soft to nestle in, after so many months on the hard boards of a ship’s deck. Since she doesn’t look at him, I look on him very hard, reckoning him up: what looks to be a stolen Spanish jacket (a knife slit in its side), a squat veiny neck with the black smudge of a tattoo peeking out from his shirt. His lips scarfed white at the edges. He has the gulping habit of one who prefers his spirits by the tankard.

Too late, I am reminded of Mister Lampard’s words about deer. Not ‘what gentlemen may hunt, common men must poach,’ but how you must shoot your prey quickly, before they feel your eyes on their flank, and flee. I have looked at this sailor too hunter-like. He turns his head and his eyes look right at mine, or at least, at the crack, where he senses mine to be.

‘Come in!’ he says, though it is not his place to invite me into Mrs Read’s parlour, which is surely more mine than his. But I do not think to disobey him. Mrs Fredericks is vanished back down the stairs like a mouse meowed at, but I want to see him better. So in I go. But only a few inches, in case I need to get out. Charles is standing close by, his dark eyes on me like a weight.

The sailor says, ‘You are John’s son?’ (Correcting himself) ‘Captain Read’s son? I detect a likeness.’

This cannot be possible but people see what suits them.

‘And who are you?’ I ask, as boldly as if I am John son’s, and more boldly than I would dare were Mrs Read not wailing into her cushions.

‘Only a poor sailor,’ he says, ‘and not one you need ask after. Only come to deliver a letter from your father to your grandmother.’

At the mention of a letter, Mrs Read’s wail rises higher, the sailor takes a gulp of his brandy, and I now see the letter like a handkerchief on the floor. I say,

‘My father has been at sea so long that I have never known more of him than his name. The least I can ask of you is that you give me your own.’

The boldness in my voice is yours. I am as surprised by it as anyone. The sound coming out of Mrs Read drops a little.

‘Ezekiel Broom,’ he says, taking a gulp of brandy to wash down the awkwardness of those hard and soft sounds together.

Now I own his name like a woodsman owns the handle of his axe, and when he sees me staring at the sorry state of his clothes he apologises, saying he has been stranded for some time on an island in the Azores and has not taken the chance to repair himself, but rather came directly to deliver the message to Mrs Read so that he might have the means to repair himself. Which I understand, as we all do, to be a request for money.

‘Is my father returning?’ I ask.

A new noise from the sofa.

‘No, Master Read,’ says Ezekiel Broom. ‘He was carried off by the ague.’

‘And that’s not the worst of it,’ wails Mrs Read. ‘He lost his Letter of Marque! He lost his Letter of Marque!’

Why her son losing a letter is worse than his being carried off, which I know to mean dying, by the ague, by all accounts a fearsome disease, is a mystery to me. But it seems I am the only person in the entire household able to close this terrible business. Adisa and Mrs Fredericks, being servants, can do nothing unless instructed, and she who might instruct them can do nothing in this moment but water every flower on her cushions. I snatch up the letter and read the promised reward. Then take a careful diversion around the Not-to-be-Trodden-Upon, kneel, pick up Mrs Read’s damp hand, and squeeze it tightly, whispering my question in her ear.

‘In the armoire,’ she says weakly. ‘In a hatbox in the armoire.’

Not an ordinary opening, the opening of that hatbox. So many promissory notes in their denominations. So many coins. So much gold! I kneel before that hatbox as though it is a reliquary. Tears come like good friends to a funeral. I do not imagine I will ever get to my feet again. But then the thin smoke of wailing reaches me. Taking what is needed, I shut it all away. I will not think on it again, I tell myself, already knowing how it will itch me at night, the thought of such bounty so close, and how I might put handfuls in my pockets and walk out into the chill dark were it not for law and the threat of sisal around my throat.

Five golden sovereigns it costs to be rid of Ezekial Broom, and once he is gone, Mrs Fredericks and I help the stricken woman to her bed. I do not imagine Mister Rotard will be instructing me after all this, but he is entirely stuck on it. Presumably he is concerned his own paltry shilling might not be honoured if he abandons his duty, though the morning has been perfectly educational in its own way: how paralysed he was, and everyone else bar me, when there was action to be taken. He does not stir from the kitchen throughout the noise, and when he presumably hears the door open and close and sees the mismatched trouser legs of Ezekial Broom roil past the half-window, and he comes up to start our lesson, as he likes to call it, the one area of ignorance that I am troubled by, concerning the Letter of Marque, he waves away as being something that need not concern me.

Only later, in the kitchen, am I enlightened. Mrs Fredericks catches me reaching for a pinch of broken pie crust behind her back and says, ’You’ll be just like your father, then. A blooming pirate.’ A Letter of Marque, Adisa explains, is the piece of paper whose thickness measures the difference between gentleman and rogue. With this letter, authorised with the King’s signature and seal, a captain may call themselves a privateer, which is to say, a private adventurer licensed to capture and rob the ships of our enemies, which in any given year might be any number of countries, but for the last several years has been Spain and France. The booty is shared between captain, crew and crown, all of whom (most especially the crown) are exempt from hanging for piracy, on account of the signature and seal. Without a Letter of Marque? Be hanged for a pirate.

You would have something to say about that, how doing anything in the King’s name seems an excuse to slip under every one of the Ten Commandments, because God-something-or-others-the-King, so says the King, and he may instruct his citizens to do all the manner of unChristian things, and still call himself a Christian.

The question of how the precious letter was lost is a matter of considerable under-stairs gossip. Who would lose such a thing? Mrs Fredericks is certain your father turned pirate, losing it deliberately so as to keep all the plunder between himself and his men. The man who brought the letter, she observed, was a most unsavoury type, and exactly the sort to be crewing a pirate ship rather than a more respectable vessel. Our current housemaid, Sarah (Mrs Read is forever dismissing housemaids), confesses herself to have no opinion at all on the matter, probably because she imagines that young women aren’t expected or even desired to have an opinion, and that if she were to go so far as adopting an opinion, if word got about, it would quash all interest from the young men (delivery boys and footboys mostly) who court her with rough-picked flowers from the fields behind Liquor Pond Street, and other forms of treacled attention. Adisa is circumspect. He wraps his words in boxes within boxes until no one can tell what he means. I detect that he does not wish to offend Mrs Fredericks (with whom he has to work most closely) by disagreeing with her, but does not wish to join her in slandering his employer’s dead son. Eventually he says,

‘He was never the thieving sort.’

‘The rich do nothing but profit from others,’ says Mrs Fredericks. ‘So he bought a licence to thieve and then he lost it.

Adisa, who has a tray of silver cutlery to occupy his fingers, says to me quietly, ‘He was a good young man.’

Mrs Fredericks tuts and turns her back.

‘Serve him right that he lost it and gets treated the same as anyone else,’ she says, before furiously putting some carrots to the knife. ‘Some people will do anything for money.’

Adisa knows this. Adisa’s father was captured in his home country and sent to work in the colonies. The negro men were treated worse than the livestock on the ship, and given almost no space to lie down in, and no clean water, and not enough food, and so many of them died on the journey that the profit of the expedition was badly affected, but that this was all that was considered, the loss of profit, and not the loss of life. He has grown quiet, absorbed in polishing his own face off the back of a spoon. When Mrs Fredericks leaves us and the boiling carrots to go upstairs, I ask,

‘But did Captain Read become a pirate, just because he lost his letter?’

He looks at me oddly. I realise I should have used the words ‘my father.’ To correct myself, I ask,

‘Am I the son of a pirate?’

‘If he has no Letter of Marque,’ he says, ‘then yes, you are. And I am the son of a slave. But what our fathers are called by other men should not reflect on us. And a pirate is not the most terrible thing to be called. Especially since the ague has him, and he cannot be hanged, God rest his soul.’

‘Why?’

He grins. ‘Because he is already dead, Master Read.’

‘No, why is a pirate not the most terrible thing to be called?’

He lays down the shiny spoon and picks up a duller implement. He tells me that he and his father were slaves on a plantation until he was six years old. Pirates had the run of the island and the capital was built around their pleasure. Though there was drunkenness and what he calls ‘looseness with ladies’, there was also generosity. The pirates would buy a pipe of wine, place it in the street, and say everyone who passed must drink from it. Gold was so bountiful with them it might have been feathers or seashells. Many pirates were so giddy with it they would to rid themselves of it however they could. His father, waiting for his master outside a store, was handed the price of his family’s freedom by a pirate merry with drink. To the pirate it was merely an amusement.

‘He insisted my father must tell his master as soon as he came out of the store, and put the money straight into his hand, so that he could see the man’s face,’ says Adisa. ‘He thought it a terrific jest. But by that jest I am standing before you now. Polishing forks. In a very handsome jacket. A pirate is free to do as he pleases.’

‘But was he not already?’ I ask. Thinking how Captain Reed was born into this house with its rugs and its drapes, and had dinner every night with his mother at the walnut table.

‘I remember your father when he was a boy,’ says Adisa. ‘His mother would have him always in his best clothes, and he was not allowed to climb or run about. But boys like to do these things. The more you stop them, the more they want to do them. Sea is the place that people run away to, no? If they have been denied adventure, and seek it?

‘Girls like to do these things too, sometimes,’ I say.

Adisa roars with laughter.

‘Girls? No. Girls don’t run away to sea. Girls run away to get married.’

He finishes with the cutlery. Every piece is in its correct place.

But my place has changed. My asking so boldly for the sailor’s name — Ezekiel Broom, a name not easily lost — clattered through Mrs Read’s grief some sense of the steel in me which she recognised, wrongly, as the blood of a Read. If she doubted my provenance before, my insistence on a formal introduction made me her grandson. She reached an arm out, tendril-like, and called for me to come into it, to be contained by her grasp and by her whisper that I was her boy now, I was her boy. If she had fantasies that her son hatched another family in the New World, and would be gifting her with grandchildren just as soon as he reappeared, Ezekial Broom swept them away. A hard broom he was for her, a broom that tips the husks and dust of things over the step and into the cold. And a soft broom for me, that cozens a little mouse out of where it was born and allows it to run freely about the house.

Our mother takes your father’s death badly. He was the one thing that kept her respectable, and now she is, she bemoans, in danger of becoming some ragtag hen. Why would he go and get himself dead of ague! As if he has deliberately slighted her by doing so. Within two weeks she has sold her wedding ring, which brings welcome income while leaving room for the opportunity of more. I sense she would be shot of me too, were I not so profitable. Without a child in her lodgings, she might be more appealing to those who might be appealed to, but at the same time the crown she earns by loaning me twice a week to Mrs Read is a precious thing she would feel the loss of. Nevertheless I feel myself, in both education and influence, slipping almost imperceptibly from one household to the other.

Mrs Read calls me to her side more often, pats at her cushions, has me sit beside her. I wonder if all those cushions aren’t only to project her brittle bones from the hard surfaces around her (for her bones are as thin as sticks) but to shield her more generally from the harshness of a life in which she only obliquely participates. She will have me be the part of her that goes out into the world. I sense I am to have all the advantages of a Read, and slip my mother’s influence. And soon she asks my mother if I may stay with her some evenings, sleep and wake here. She will pay my mother no less in maintenance. My mother is surprisingly agreeable. Is there not greater chance of my discovery? Neither of us seem to believe so. In Mrs Read’s eyes I am so firmly her grandson now, that were she to walk in upon me bathing she would probably not see what I am missing.

Adisa is instructed to show me my sleeping quarters. In the entrance hall he pauses, very serious, and says,

‘Is it the truth you are Mrs Read’s grandson?’

He stares at me with not the smallest bit of give in his eyes. It is all I can do to say,

‘Why — why would you ask such a thing?’

‘We do not pay for the company of our grandchildren. We expect it. And we also give them pleasant rooms to sleep in, and not the coal shed.’

‘I am sleeping in the coal shed?’

He winks.

‘That is only what we call it. It is really very nice. It doesn’t even have a rat anymore. Only beetles.’

I watch his face: it stays very still, very earnest, his eyes looking into mine as though he is most concerned to be of help. And then he crumples into laughter.

‘You are my favourite boy,’ he says. ‘My very favourite boy. You are sleeping in the attic. You will like it. It is hot at this time of year, but not too cold in winter, because the chimney runs through it. You will like it.’

I keep looking at him to see if he will change his mind again, and when he sees that is what I am doing, he laughs even more. ‘Come, follow me,’ he says, going up the stairs.

I do as I’m told. He pauses on the landing outside Mrs Read’s bedroom and opens the other door on the same landing.

‘My room is in the attic. This is your room. It was your father’s.’ He gleans much amusement from my face. ‘We are going to have a fine time, together,’ he says. ‘We are going to be friends.’

But a few days later, in a fit of apoplexy after seeing your father’s name mentioned in a broadsheet, Mrs Read ups and dies.

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“Why does it feel like I’m playing life in Hard Mode?” my son asked recently.

Same, I thought. But I think I know the answer.

He and I were conceived inside depressed mothers. Thanks to being stuck in an abusive marriage, I cried every day while pregnant with him. My mother, deeply disappointed by her affection-free life, was similarly miserable while pregnant with me, and tried to abort me by drinking neat gin.

Being bathed for nine months in your mother’s tears does something to a person. One of the things it does is hardwire your brain for ADHD (receipts here1). Nature is nothing if not adaptive: if you’re born to a mother who’s ambivalent about your existence, it’s helpful to have your circuitry wired for survival. Hyper-distractibility is a form of hyper-vigilance; constantly scanning your environment for opportunity or threat. The flip-side, hyperfocus? When you might have to fend for yourself, you’re going to need it. Can’t be lackadaisical chasing your next meal — the deer in the jungle2 — when you might, at any moment, be abandoned like Mowgli.

So let’s say I had a substrate, different from my siblings, on which the rest of my experiences were built. A heightened sensitivity to rejection and a lot of first-hand experience of it, due to all the reasons that ADHD kids are annoying: impulsive, chaotic, messy, tuning out when people are speaking, forgetting stuff and leaving things half done, and the key one, no filter — speaking your mind, directly, unaware of how your words will land.

I would have done better — a whole lot better — if I’d ever felt loved as a child. But love was for other people. I was clearly faulty. That was the baseline. Then, when I was eight, Wavy Line Cornflakes moved in.

This was not my nickname for our stepfather, but Wavy Line cornflakes were the result, after a fashion. Living with him ushered in a regime that I came to call Food Apartheid (I was a child of the seventies; apartheid was on the news every night, and it was the only word I had for a system where one group ate well and the other didn't). The adults had good food. We had cheap food. My stepfather had Kellogg’s cornflakes. We had ‘Wavy Line’ (the cheapest brand from the Spar).3 My stepfather had Kerrygold butter. We had one-litre tubs of cooking margarine from the Cash n’ Carry that smelled like engine oil. My stepfather had gold-top milk (creamy). We had silver top.

And so it went on. We had bread and jam for tea most nights of the week for ten years; he and my mother, separately, ate quality food (steak, salmon and veg) a little later. The only time we had better food (though mostly, it was still bread and jam) was on Tuesdays and Saturdays, when my stepsisters came to tea.

I’ll be clear: this was done to all four of us, and the three of us who survived our childhoods came through with various dents in our psyches. I can’t speak for the others, but in my case, the malware installed in the vulnerable operating system of my ADHD, the chief ‘dent,’ was severely sub-optimal self-esteem.

I knew this was a weakness, so I daren’t let anyone know. I faked self-esteem (and was called ‘aloof’). I faked self-belief (and was called ‘arrogant’). Fully believing I was born to be a writer of note, I wrote a poem every day for five years, from the age of 13. I hyper-focused my way into prizes and accolades. Built a tremendous carapace of ‘worth’ around myself, constructed of achievements: Grade A exams, a first-class honours degree in science, and a high-paying programming job at which I excelled. ‘Look at me! I have value!’ was the game.

But beneath it, the whisper that any good predator could sense. The ‘sorries’ that fell out of my mouth like confetti. The ‘bad childhood’ stories I told for entertainment when drunk. Predatory men love a trophy-type woman who’s been told for many years she’s both too much and not enough. And pretty soon, I was in the hands of an expert manipulator, who insisted, when he abused me, that my tears were manipulating him.

Many years have passed since my escape and recovery. And nineteen next month since I started clearing the effects of emotional abuse using EFT tapping. Yet still, despite enormous progress, there’s this niggling doubt about my own worth that began in the womb and was set in the concrete of resentfully digested Wavy Line cornflakes. No one would know it’s there because I’m still an ace at faking full brilliance, still terrified people will see the carapace cracks. My armour of achievements is considerable now: an award-winning novel, newspaper bylines, poetry on the syllabus, and for ten years a senior post at the UK’s top creative university.

But Life has decided it’s time I take the carapace off. It has done that by removing me from my much loved and financially secure job, and shredding everyone’s brain with short-form reels, which smashed up book sales, and along with AI, has turned the world into a place where the skills I’ve spent a lifetime developing are no longer required (content warning if you write literary fiction, don’t read this, it will ruin your week).

Layer by layer, the things I have used to persuade myself I have value have been removed. They’re all history now, and sometimes it feels like the world is telling me, so am I.

As I once again ‘pivot’ (how many times? when will it end?), seeking ways to raise my profile and shore up my income, I'm once again thrown into facing the confidence gap I’ve lived with for decades. Naturally, I’ve been using EFT tapping to dig out its roots. And what did I find, yet again, but ten years at that table.

This statement had a real emotional kick:

Even though I learned at the dinner table that the good things go to other people, not me, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.

You know what kills me with this one? I’ve proved it false over and over again. Good things have come to me many, many times. I’m surrounded by the palpable results of all those good things. But childhood malware doesn’t care about facts.

You deleted it before, and thought you got it all, but it replicated itself, as good viruses do, and lay dormant, deep in your operating system. It only takes you opening a crisis file (redundancy, or a book that dies on submission) for the thing to reboot and start running in the background again. So quiet, you don’t even notice. You’re just wondering why it’s so hard to get your arse to the desk.

Delete, delete, delete.

This belief was created by a fucked up man and a woman on a budget. Two people who were kids in the middle of a war where bombs were literally falling on their houses, so we — in their eyes — were blessed beyond belief. He was insecure because he’d had so little as a kid, so he guarded his wealth like Smaug the dragon on his hoard of gold; he refused to support another man’s kids. Mum had her finances totally separate, feeding and clothing her kids on a very tight budget. That was the reason for the system that wreaked so much psychological havoc on me. It was all down to money. And if only I’d known at the time, and not had to work it out for myself; the realisation didn’t land until after her death, when I was 38.

This is why I believe in complete openness with children. Why being open with them is a cardinal rule. When they were small, if I lost my temper, I’d apologise as soon as I was calm, and explain what stressed me, and that it wasn’t their fault. When I had to say no to three fancy ice creams, I explained that I only had a ten pound note left for the week, and that was their dinner money. So none of them went into the world believing, as far as I know, that they were worth less than other people. Amazing how much less damage you do when you don’t keep secrets.

Life, I guess you’re right. It makes no sense, as a person who is open in principle, to keep this damn carapace on.

In a couple of weeks, for paid subscribers, I'll share the full tapping sequence I'm using to dig this one out — set-up statements and all.

or if you’d rather,

Join our community read of Why I Stole Your Life, the epic 18th-century adventure of the real-life soldier and pirate Mary Read

Mary Read’s half-brother, Mark, is missing. With their mother on a mission to extract money from Mark’s grandmother, the wealthy widow Mrs Read, Mary and her Ma set off for London, with Mary disguised as a boy.

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You Will Learn Nothing Good From Mister Dryden

I am not the only one not going by their name. Charles, the negro servant, corrects me the very first time we are alone. I have a question about the gloves but have no sooner begun with ‘Charles,’ then he stops me with a finger.

‘My name is not Charles,’ he says. ‘My name is Adisa.’

I might say my name is not Mark, to show him we are not so different, but if I told him my real name he would know we’re as different as cat and dog.

‘Adisa,’ he says again, as though my thinking was a kind of not listening.

I say it back to him, and though it is not a complicated name, I step over it uncertainly like an unlit path. He laughs.

‘Adisa,’ he repeats. ‘Remember it. Charles is my English name. Mrs Read gave it to me. There were two kings of that name I’m told, though I’m also told that the first had his head chopped off and the second was a fool who was thrown off the throne. So perhaps it is not a good name.’

‘I think it’s a good name,’ I say.

‘Adisa is a better name,’ he says. ‘It means One Who Makes His Meaning Clear. But you must call me Charles in front of Mrs Read.’

Is he a slave? Oh no, he says, he is a free man. He was a slave as a boy, but not now. He earns a wage with Mrs Read. He is saving, he says, tapping the side of his nose in a tradesman’s gesture. Saving, yes, in the hope he might one day afford a wife.

‘You would buy a wife?’

He barks a laugh. ‘No! No, you strange boy. Women must be kept though, they must be kept.’

Like horses? Like chickens? Wide eyed staring at him, I suppose, from the way he laughs again.

‘They have babies, you know. Wives will have babies when you marry them. They can’t be working then. So you have to work enough to keep all of you. You, you wife, and your babies too. That is how women cost, even when they have no price on them.’

Me thinking: that is how I would be enslaved.

But already I belong to Mrs Read.

She is conscious of how I reflect on her, with my country speech and common ways. Her son married down, and nothing to be done about that: many a clever young man’s made stupid by the tug of his loins. But no grandson of mine, she says, no grandson of mine, as though the person who grubbed about in Broxholme for eight years was another creature, and I have just now been born, entire, out of a flower, like a fairy boy in a story. No grandson of mine, knocking at my ears over and over with new rules that please or perplex me. No grandson of mine will be torn-trousered, or go unbreakfasted, no grandson of mine will ask for the sugar bowl in that manner. She is writing my future, too. No grandson of mine will go off fighting other people’s wars, no matter how noble it might be to fight for king and country. No grandson of mine will do anything that wastes their mind. They will find an occupation that keeps them safely in London. No grandson of mine will go uneducated.

These are the words that conjure Mister Cedric Rotard. Mister Rotard has the appearance of a spindle that has lost the best part of its wool. The strain of being a tutor has rubbed him threadbare ever since he left what he calls ‘my alma mater’, which he told me curtly is not his mother but something called a university, which he speaks of in a crushed voice, as though it really were his mother, and had loved him the way mothers are meant to do, but had unexpectedly turned on him and thrown him out on his bare arse-bones. I have the strongest feeling he would have stayed there had he been able, so he didn’t have to teach little toe rags (which I heard him call me to Adisa) their alphabets. After a year of Wednesdays, we are well beyond the alphabet, and he is trying to do what he calls extending my vocabulary, perhaps so that I can understand better what he is saying to me, because many of his words are a lot longer than the words I have been used to, and have their roots in Latin, which he also says he will teach me. I ask him where they speak Latin, and he says ‘Nowhere but where gentlemen mingle’ which he seems to think a very fine quality. I ask him if there are no countries where they speak Latin and he answers, ‘Not one,’ looking as pleased if Mrs Frederick the housekeeper has brought him a slice of her honey cake, and I say, then I won’t learn it, but might he please learn me French, and he says ‘will you’ and ‘teach me’ and ‘No’. He is confusing to me and confused himself, more often than is safe for someone somewhere as busy as London, and is more likely to remember a line of poetry from a man in a powdered wig than he is to remember where he is in a sentence, or where his spectacles are, or that a respectable man is required to tuck his shirt into his trousers.

He is fond of switching me with his rule whenever I fail to meet his measure of me. One time, when I am making an error, he swats the back of my hand so hard that I am surprised into the moment of his death. Crossing a road with his eyes concerned in a letter, he mis-steps on a wet cobble and all his long body collapses like a pile of soft fruit, under the iron-rimmed wheels of a dray cart. I see his pince-nez — the same set he peers through at me daily — crushed into bitter jewels on the cobbles, the purple snake of his blood, the half-read letter released from a stricken hand. Not so many years away, from his uncreased brow and his same-style jacket. Returning to the sunlit dust of the room, the pine desk, and my stinging hand paralysed on the paper, I hold my eyes to his very firmly, as though I can stick him to the present moment. A moment in which — I observe — he sighs a breath out of his nose and tsks his tongue against his teeth. His eyes grow aghast to be gazed upon.

‘What, boy?’

‘Never read out of doors,’ I say.

To which he says nothing, but turns and walks to the window, shivering across his shoulders.

Mister Rotard thinks very fondly of Mister Dryden, our national poet, and will quote him at the smallest provocation. The sight of a polished apple in a bowl on the dining table, for example, provokes him to stand very still, as though afraid to lose his balance, and then throw his arm towards the curtain as though it were about to draw back to reveal an audience, and recite a small verse. So compelling is his action that I look to the curtain for a hidden listener, but there is nothing there but a dead bumblebee lying below, which must have given up on the French windows ever being opened again because Mrs Read has been reading about the dangers of breathing in fog. It has been foggy for three days. But Mister Rotard cares not a fig about fog. Mister Rotard only cares about the mother university and Mister Dryden. I think Mister Dryden a horrible prig but cannot say so, for the certainty that it would lead Mister Rotard to cuff me round the ear. He is in the habit of cuffing me round the ear whenever he imagines I am not listening or have not heard him. Which is often, because rarely do I understand what he is saying when he recites poetry, and when I do understand, I do not like it. This is the verse which the apple prompted him to perform to the curtain:

‘A woman’s counsel brought us first to woe,

And made her man his paradise forego,

Where at heart’s ease he liv’d; and might have been

As free from sorrow as he was from sin.’

It is from a poem called ‘The Cock and the Fox’. He tells me Mister Dryden claims the words to be those of the cock Chanticleer, which is a fine trick when it gives licence to other cocks to crow them across English parlours. Mister Rotard has said this verse at me half a dozen times now, as if expecting me to agree heartily, because I am a young man, and therefore should imagine that women are to blame for everything. Whereas being a girl, and knowing what I know about my own making, and how that drove Ma to gin, and her husband to flee back to the sea, I might be inclined to throw some blame the other way. But wickedness does not reside only in one sex, and goodness does not choose its host by their reproductive organs. You schooled me early on that what the Church preaches to us is lies, and there to keep us bent low, scrubbing steps and hauling coal, or bowing and curtseying to their lord and ladyships. Eve’s ruin of Adam, for which womankind are punished forever with the curse of monthly pain and deathly childbearing, is one of the worst of those lies.

Mister Rotard likes to pronounce things about Man, and Man is meant to mean all of us, though clearly it only means men. Man has direction and purpose whereas woman has none, and not even a capital letter. Man must make things in the world — strides, his mark, waves — but woman can only make things in the house and only things of no consequence.

Yet the knowledge that Mister Rotard bestows upon me is a gift. The means by which I may sign my name, and read what I am signing it to, and read almost any book in Mrs Read’s dead husband’s study, is a gift usually given only to those with extra meat between the legs. The small bulge where my pizzle should be is only a balled up stocking. But with this simple trick and a face that might be either sex or none, I am now equipped to read what the world has to tell me.

Education takes up the whole of Wednesdays, but your grandfather’s library is mine on Sundays, so long as I have been well-behaved at the dinner table. Your grandfather was a merchant trader. His study is filled with the accounts of travellers and seafarers. And there are maps. I stare at them: the strange names, the inky outlines of shorelines. I feel for a sense of you in any of them: the quickening of knowledge, this old kind of knowledge that has always been mine without trying. I ask which bay, which island, which port contains you. But I cannot empty myself to receive the answer. It is only questions, more questions, a fury of questions, filling up my head like brine in drowning lungs.

Three summers go by. My thumb and two fingers are stained black at their tips, as though rotten with writing. When first I began my twice-weekly visits, Mrs Read was concerned that I was not tall enough. She said I must eat more chard, because ‘chard makes long bones’. So I ate more chard. Always chard on Sundays when she could get hold of it. After three years she is concerned I am too tall. Far too tall for my age, surely. No more chard, and less sunlight. She barters an extra day a week out of my mother. The country is fevered with talk of war and this worries her. Boys have such a tendency to be romantic about war, and what of their mothers and what of their grandmothers, and what of the poor dear girls who might have had husbands. I am not to imagine she will ever buy me a commission.

‘That is a thing that will not happen,’ she says. ‘There will be no more calamities.’

But no amount of money gives a person freedom from that.

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Impostors Run in the Family

London seems the finest place in the world. The road, having hardened, begins to clatter beneath the wheels, signalling that the great city has begun. From the top of the coach, where we sit as outsides (at half the price of insides) we can admire to my side a great park full of deer, and to Ma’s, handsome palaces set back from the road. All the noblemen and noblewomen have town dwellings as well as country ones, the coach driver explains, and they are gathered together here, each showing off with grand entrances and ornamental frontages how very favoured they are. Brother, you would laugh the scorn off your boot laces to see the nonsense they get up to with their lions on gateposts and their fancy curlicue railings. Then the deer park gives way to more fine houses, closer to the carriageway but still very grand and tall. From these first impressions, I imagine we are going to live in the highest manner. We turn into another fine road but soon it gives way, as high morals give way to corruption, to something of a meaner character, and soon I am convinced this is a devilish kind of place, somewhere so far from the sea that nothing fresh or fully alive can dwell in it. There are beggars by the side of the road with all kinds of hideous deformities, and elderly vegetables on the market stalls, and fish that have been dead for so long that they are blind and half-stinking. Though even their death-stink can hardly compete with the stench of human dung from open gutters. I see a woman hitch up her skirts and relieve herself in by the side of the road in broad daylight. Though she is wobbling, so might be drunk. Everybody seems to be drunk. It is only mid-afternoon as we are arriving, but I have never seen so many drunken people all in one place, and I very quickly surmise it is because one will need to be drunk all the time to live in a place as foul as London.

Then it grows finer again. Then more foul. Loud men and sharp women and grubby children, and gentlemen on horseback, and traders with their goods carts, and dray horses pulling beer in all directions, as though the place is made entirely of public houses. A man making music out of a contraption strung around his neck and another man juggling for money. Then clothes grow smarter and the buildings straighter, and huge domed cathedral rises out of the city’s stone heart. And all around it, trading and hawking and market stalls. This is a city that will not make up its mind, and I have no sense of where I might belong in it.

When we are finally disgorged from the coach, Ma tells me we are headed for Mrs Read’s house in Hatton Street. Mrs Read’s house is not like the houses I am used to, and I am not to touch anything, and I am not gawp at anything, and I am not to speak unless spoken to, and I am not to answer to any name except yours. Ma spittles my cheek with her handkerchief to unsmudge it, though her handkerchief is surely fouler than my face.

She pulls on the bell cord.

The door swings wide, answered by a negro servant wearing a dress coat and white gloves. He stares at us and I stare right back. Ma makes her spine stiff and explains she is Mrs Margret Read, come to see Mrs Ada Read about her grandson Mark. How she can call herself Mrs I do not know. I suppose it is in the same spirit that she is calling me Mark. Mrs is only for wealthy and respectable ladies and we both know she is a Goodwife if she is anything, and in truth not even that. The negro allows us in and tells us to wait in the hall, which is a room bigger than our whole downstairs room and with its own fireplace too. I marvel at the walls, which are made of carved wooden panels. It is not quite as grand as Lady Upton’s house, but I find it hard to believe that our mother married a man of such class and means. Our mother bends down towards my ear and whispers with considerable force,

‘This is a fine house, Mark, is it not? Your father grew up here.’

She has been preparing for days, but for me, it is very itchy to wear your name. Before I can object that no one is listening, the servant returns to usher us into the parlour.

Mrs Read is a tiny bird lady sitting on a velvet seat in a nest of cushions. Every cushion is embroidered with a flower, either purple or orange. The kind that grew in the vicarage garden, crocuses. Because of the cushions, her feet are not touching the floor, and sway a little as though blown by the breeze coming in at the window. A fierce face, and though this is your grandmother, I recognise nothing of you in it. There is much more of you in the handsome fellow painted in his waistcoat who hangs above the mantlepiece. Mrs Read purses her lips together as if she has nothing to say to us, but she sees that our mother is about to speak and determines to be first. Her voice seems to come from very far away, as though it is the voice of a person she has swallowed.

‘Margret. What a surprise to see you. You might have sent a message.’

Ma cannot write, as Mrs Read must surely know.

‘It has been a long time,’ our mother agrees.

‘Many years,’ says Mrs Read. ‘Many years. And this is young Mark? The last time I saw him, he was only a babe in arms.’

‘This is he,’ says Ma.

‘Let me look at you boy,’ says Mrs Read, and beckons me towards her until, seeing my shoes about to reach the colourful carpet in front of her, cries ‘Stop! Never on the Turkish. We go round. Stay there. I can see you well enough.’

From the twitch in her nostrils, I think she can smell me, too. She leans back a little.

‘He’s a sorry state, Margret, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘It has been a long time since your son sent any money,’ Ma says.

‘It has been a long time since he sent anyone anything,’ says Mrs Read.

Ma nods. If they thought him drowned, neither woman will say it. As I later discover, their tight lips on this matter conceal quite different conclusions. Ma thinks everyone dead at the smallest opportunity. But Mrs Read will not believe the sea has swallowed her son until it coughs up bones.

‘As a consequence,’ says Ma, trying to pick her way past the silence, ‘we have fallen on hard times.’

‘Clearly,’ says Mrs Read. ‘And now you have come to see if I might soften those times, is that it?’

Ma casts her eyes down to the floor. ‘Not for me,’ she says. ‘But for your grandson. For the boy.’

Mrs Read tinkles a little bell that is sitting on the circular table at her elbow, and the negro servant appears.

‘Charles,’ she said, ‘would you bring us some tea? And some lemonade for the boy? Do sit down,’ she says to our mother, pointing towards a nervy-looking chair. And to me, ‘You’d better stand.’ I must be grubbier than I imagined. ‘Have you ever tasted lemonade?’ she asks me.

‘No, Ma’am,’ I answer, and she seems pleased to be addressed so. It came out of my mouth without thinking, because of how she reminds me of Lady Upton: her chest puffed up, and lace upon it, and servants to do her bidding.

‘It’s quite the sensation in London now,’ she says. ‘Made of lemons and sugar. You’ve had sugar?’

‘Yes, once.’ Only remembering as I say it that I stole a dab of it at the big house. But Ma is already speaking over me.

‘We’ve not had many luxuries since my husband went to sea. Mark was only a baby then.’

There is a glare in our mother, as though it is Mrs Read’s fault that he went to sea, and not her fault at all for marrying a sea captain, who would likely do such a thing. She carries on, her arm towards me as though she is a market trader come to sell a troublesome colt.

‘He is ever so thin, as you see, but he is a good boy, and he does not deserve to suffer when there is —’ she gazes mock-absently about the room, its drapes and hangings, its not-to-be-trodden-on carpet, its painting over the mantelpiece — ‘when there is the means to mend it.’

Mrs Read looks as though she is going to puff her feathers up, but then some thought deflates her, and she becomes tinier again. It is me she is looking at. Perhaps she imagines she sees something of her son in me, though there is not so much as the smallest scrap of Captain Read in my body.

‘It’s true,’ she says, ‘that my son would not want to see his own flesh and blood in such a sorry state. I can offer —’

Charles returns with a tray of tea things: an ornate silver pot, two bone china cups on saucers, a tiny sieve sitting on a tiny bowl, and a cloudy glass of what can only be my lemonade. With his precise white-gloved hands, Charles sets the tea things on the round table, next to the bell. He balances the tiny sieve over a cup, and pours the tea through it, catching a miniature slurry of dead leaves. A splash of tea hits his gloved fingers, and I wonder if he wears the gloves to protect his hands from tea, or to protect the tea from his hands. I feel sure he would not wear gloves at all, except that Mrs Read makes him. When he has gone, she stirs one lump of sugar into her tea, and continues where she left off.

‘I can offer to take the child in.’

I take a sip of the lemonade. It is nice and nasty all at once.

‘That is very kind of you,’ says to Ma, ‘but I could not be without the child.’ She puts several lumps of sugar into her cup, and from Mrs Read’s face, more than I believe is polite. Mrs Read speaks as if our mother hasn’t.

‘I will look after him and raise him as my own. Breed him up to be of good standing. He will want for nothing.’

This sounds good to me. Knowing how Ma despises me, I cannot think that she would say no.

‘No,’ she says. ‘It would break my heart to part with the child.’ I think this very well done. Her cup almost trembles on its saucer.

Mrs Read considers her. Considers me.

‘You would be welcome to visit him from time to time.’

‘Excuse me for appearing ungracious,’ our mother replies, seeming anything but. ‘The child is all I have left of my husband.’

Mrs Read to consider this statement, with spaces between those sips. Eventually she says,

‘You might visit him once a week. Would that be tolerable to you?’

‘It would be tolerable to me,’ I say, and Ma glares at me before turning to the older woman.

‘Mrs Read, we are speaking of my only child.’

‘And my only grandchild. I would like to be better acquainted.’

‘I might bring the child to you once a week.’

Negotiations continue in this manner for long enough for the tea to be drunk to its dregs. It is finally agreed that Mrs Read will provide a crown a week for my maintenance, and in return I will be brought to her every Wednesday, to be educated, and every Sunday to have dinner with her, Ma not to be present at either occasion. Our mother is given a crown in her hand as down-payment. We leave under a veil of politeness and gentility until the door is closed and we are halfway down the street and Ma cuffs me round the head.

‘I told you not to speak. You nearly cost me thirteen pounds a year! “It would be tolerable to me.” And I suppose you want me to starve while you live like a gentleman! Not that it would last long. The old woman is a fool, but not a complete fool. How long do you think you could deceive her, living under her roof? She would find you out, and then we would both be derelict!’

In the days that follow she says nothing more about the deception. We take lodgings not far from Mary-Bone. She refers to me as Mark and he and him in company, and Mark when we’re alone. The best lies, she says, are like the best dogs: kept both inside and out. Never again do I hear my name from her mouth.

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Eek! Don’t make me open Threads! Don’t make me! Ah, no, there I go, and… oh, it’s okay, it’s just some inspiration for this week’s post, so I can label it ‘work’.

‘Work’ is not a negative word for me. As a freelancer prone to just sliding into mmmmm, this late Spring sunshine looks delicious, it means useful productivity. Sometimes it also means I can pay for the month’s supply of cheese, or a corticosteroid injection into my glenohumeral joint to ease the pain I’ve developed from shouldering the world’s troubles (scheduled for Thursday, wish me all the luck and a decent local anaesthetic).

I spy with my both-long-and-short-sighted-astigmatic eye (screen time, screen time) a bunch of women being hilarious with words. This is what I love about men’s bad behaviour being so front-and-centre these days; the way it generates snort-your-coffee comedy.

We begin with trishaaaaa.95 (her screen name voiced by James Corden in Gavin & Stacey), saying

Here, curated for your delight, the best answers, with definitions (some by me, some by the wicked women of threads).1

Men-on-pause

(noun) A bodily response to the fetid contents of the dating pool. Hormonal shutdown provoked by the pervasive stench of misogyny, marking the end of reproductive desire.

Byesexual

(adj.) Being single for so long that you don’t even remember what it’s like to have romantic/sexual feelings.

DisappointMENt

(noun) The feeling of sadness, frustration, or dissatisfaction that occurs when a series of men fail to meet your hopes or expectations.

Nomosexual

(noun, dialect, Southern US) No mo’ sex y’all

or, to step away from neologisms

Frontal Lobe Development

A long, complex maturation process that begins in infancy and continues into a person’s early 30s. According to those who have experienced it, ‘It comes with a cat and a good vibrator.’

Clarity

A condition that seems to affect more and more women every day.

Done

That’s what it’s called. You’re done.

Yes, a lot of women are very much done with the dating/marriage/babies game. I mean, I’m happily married, have sons and some excellent male friends, and my male patrons and supporters are the best of the best, but there’s no way on earth, if I found myself single, I’d be looking for a mate.

I snapped mine up before the Manosphere got its dick out and started pissing in the dating pool. Before tender, mutually enjoyable intimate acts were deemed ‘vanilla.’ Before boys started barking at their female teachers. Before watching porn that degrades and dehumanises women became as normal as wiping your bum (and I have intel that some men now favour porn over wiping). Before young women started letting their dates give them brain damage, risking incontinence, a stroke, paralysis or death and believing it was normal, or even ‘sexy’.

There are so many threats: society-wide, if you don’t give us sex, or we’ll get violent! Oh, honey, you already are. That’s why we’re done.

And the men who wouldn’t harm us: we’re sorry, but if you want any chance to go dating again, get married, have kids, you’ve got to fix these other guys. The ones who think that we’re stupid, less-than-human, naturally subservient. We’re so done trying.

This is going to be so good for men. A chance to grow that we’ve denied them because of all we put up with, and excused. We so desperately wanted to think well of them, excuse the odd ‘bad apple.’ But the last couple of years, men (en masse) have really shown us who they are, in podcast after podcast, anti-feminist whine after whine, crime after unprosecuted crime. Stripping women of their rights over their bodies, setting sights on their right to vote.

Imagine making sex incredibly dangerous, life-alteringly, life-endingly dangerous for women, and then whining that women don’t want it.

Listen, we get it. We (most of us) like sex too. When our partners are thoughtful, considerate, hygienic, and into mutual pleasure. But it isn’t a right. It’s a nice-to-have. And as my husband and I like to say to each other, when someone’s been naughty and still expects treats, “bad baby, no biscuit.”2

For years, women kept downloading the latest software updates, getting more and more advanced, while many men, unwilling to adapt, seem stuck on version 1.0.3 And after a while, there’s such a gulf between the updated machine and the unpatched one that they can’t even talk to each other. Different operating systems. It gets so that the one that never got its software upgraded becomes genuinely dangerous to connect to: buggy crap that can crash out on you at any moment, full of viruses and trojans. And so vulnerable to malware that you should never plug it into the internet.

So, listen. Take the updates. I know it’s annoying. You have to stop what you’re doing for a bit, let the machine whir away behind a black screen, giving you no more info than “updating”, with a progress bar so static you suspect it’s gone home to put the kids to bed, make itself a cocktail and watch an episode of Fallout. But no pain, no gain, as men who definitely own a foam roller tell us.

Time to wipe the old hard drive free of every bit of old code that programmed you, as a boy, to think you were ‘better’ than girls … and all that goes with it.

We’re pretty sure you can do it, because women did. And I’ve heard tell that boys are just as capable as girls are — when they put their minds to it.

P.S. First person to say “not all men” in the comments has to send me a tenner.

Writing is my sole means of support. I know, what an idiot! It’s just the way life worked out for this iconoclastic misfit. If you love what I do, let me know in the comments, press the heart, share, upgrade, or

and I won’t tell anyone you’re a generous bugger who’s got a soft spot for ageing British eccentrics.

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A Gentleman is Not Necessarily

We are walking to London. The shirt money buys food to save on lodgings, with the weather still fine, we sleep by the roadside. Ma says this is not shameful. Many good people fall on hard times and must do the same on their way to a new life. On the road we meet people our mother calls itinerants. An Irish tinker, who won’t stop talking to us, because when Ma pretends she is deaf, he turns to me, saying things that make our mother wince. A man with a travelling puppet show, which he has been wheeling about on a handcart. When we see him there is no show, unless we are meant to give a farthing to watch him sitting under a tree and crying. Many itinerants are men back from the wars, with their uniforms worn through, and missing pieces of their bodies. Ma says don’t look at them, the itinerants, we don’t want to mix with the likes of them. Doesn’t sleeping in the ditches make us itinerants too? Ma says no, we are honest travellers, a different thing entirely. Pressed further: because we have somewhere to go. Where? Never you mind, she says, you are always full of questions, and questions get a person into trouble. So I shut my mouth, thinking that I am a person today, and glad of that.

In Exeter, Ma diverts us to the river, where she dips her handkerchief into the water and scrubs at her face until it comes up pink and the handkerchief grey. She rinses it in the Exe and then dabs and scrubs at the tell-tale places on her dress, a dress that says here and there it has spent two nights kissing ditches.

She lets that dress dry, with her in it, on Cathedral Green. The Cathedral sits very wide at its front, like a broody hen hatching something under the earth. From the side it looks like a whole lot of smaller churches all squeezed together. The grass around it is well trimmed by sheep but the verger or someone has cleared up their doings. We don’t say much. Ma doesn’t want grass stains on her skirts, so she walks about. But the grass won’t make a stain on your old moleskin trousers, which were made to be the colour of dirt. So I lie back on the grass letting the sun soak into me, like our afternoons on Guzzle Down or at Great Wishings, when the whole sky would sail over us and you’d talk about adventures you’d have, when you were old enough.

When the light fades, we go to an inn with a picture of a white hart, and Ma tells me to wait outside. Swifts are screeching around the eaves, and there’s still heat in the air, and the smell of dinner, which makes me hungry. We had pasties on the Cathedral Green, from a woman who came out of her house with a basket, and Ma wrapped four for the journey, but they are with her and not me. And I am not journeying. The stars come peeping out, and one or two coaches clatter over the cobbles into the courtyard, empty themselves of people and baggage, shed their horses into the stables, and still I wait. Crouch down with my back against the wall, listening to the laughter inside as the ale grows it. Think of that night. I see you put the note in his hand and I see myself running in and snatching it out again, no harm done, and the Dutch sailors laughing at these silly littluns playing a game they don’t understand, a game that would have kept you in Fishtown, with both your shoes, and Mister Lampard with our mother, and me in the straw bed in the eaves next to you, where I would give anything to be.

Ma is gone for so long that I wonder if she has slipped away without me seeing. People come out, laughing and half-falling on the cobbles. The moon has risen until it is high over the Cathedral, silvering the roofs of the houses. Clunker-clunk, the inn door bolted from the inside. I go and relieve myself behind the stables. Then return to my spot, lay my hands down on the cobbles, and my head down on my hands, and pretend that your arms are around me.

I am shaken awake. Two bare feet. Ma’s feet. She straightens herself to standing, clutching a blanket around her shoulders. Underneath, the creamy shock of undergarments. She motions me up.

My bones are so chilled that it’s hard to move, but I follow to the back of the inn, clumsy on my not-woken legs. She signals quiet, then opens the door. A servants’ passage, a narrow staircase. No candle, but I can make out the stairs from the light that leaks through an upstairs window. She creeps along the passageway with me as her shadow. She stops at the third door.

‘Get under the bed,’ she whispers. ‘I’ve put a blanket there. Don’t make a sound and don’t come out until I tell you.’

She opens the door. The bedchamber is flooded with moonlight. The bed is entirely unmade and something — someone — is snoring there. An invisible gentleman is draped over the corner chair: breeches, shirt, waistcoat, hat. Nothing but clothes without any gentleman to puff them up, and her dress beside those things, and a tall pair of riding boots standing by the chair like a soldier on duty. She points me towards the dark space under the bed. I slide under, quiet as I can be. There’s the creak of her getting into the bed above me. So the gentleman has let her share his bed, but there is no room for me. Or it would not be right for me to share with him too. Or he does not know about me. Whatever the truth may be, the only truth that matters to me is that I am not abandoned, and the hard floor is better than the hard ground, and the air inside the inn is warmer than the air without, and I have a blanket to boot, which is not only beneath me but wrapped around me.

For the first few minutes of the morning, there is a great to-do. The whole bed is creaking and squeaking, as though Ma and the gentleman can’t get comfortable, and are wrestling with each other. I think they must be about to get out of bed, but neither Ma’s feet nor the gentleman’s feet land on the floor, and I wonder that they are having such difficulty getting up, except that this is one of the best rooms of the inn, and the mattress is probably filled with feathers, like Lady Upton’s at the big house, and maybe too squashy to make getting out of it very easy. But at last the commotion subsides, with the gentleman crying out like he has hurt himself, and I hear Ma making shushing noises, meaning maybe he has, and then all is quiet again. I am aching to relieve myself, and the chamber pot is right next to my face, but can’t be used without me getting out from underneath. One of them used it in the night, and it is a poor stench for my nose to have for breakfast, but I am determined to be good after being left outside for so long.

Then the gentleman is snoring again. Blessedly, a pair of feet appear — Ma’s — and she makes the smallest of rustles as she gathers up her clothes. She signals me out to the open door and we are away down the stairs. In the rear courtyard she pulls on the rest of her clothes and I help her with her stays and ties. We use the jakes before we leave the premises. We’re walking very fast, faster than usual, getting ourselves back on the road to London. The light is cold and grey, the sun only just coming up.

She says, ‘If we get ourselves to the Black Swan by half past the hour, we can ride the stagecoach to London.’ Seeing my confusion, she reaches into her purse and shows me three golden sovereigns before dropping them back inside.

‘You got them from the gentleman?’ I ask, though I can think of no other place where a woman like our mother would get anything gold.

‘He had plenty,’ she says. ‘We can ride for a hundred miles with one of these. Two of them will get us to London. Come on!’

She picks up her heels, and I do the same.

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